


Fly by Night

by VVCephei (Anderazu)



Category: RWBY
Genre: Alternate Universe - Cyberpunk, Angst, Artificial Intelligence, Eventual Relationships, Everybody lies, F/F, Families of Choice, M/M, Psychic Abilities
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-07
Updated: 2021-03-12
Packaged: 2021-03-17 17:34:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 42,721
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28603770
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anderazu/pseuds/VVCephei
Summary: One ragtag band of street runners, one overstressed security head, and a fistful of secrets. What could go wrong?A cyberpunk AU where Hunters use illegal psychic powers to fight Grimm, the people of Mantle fight for scraps, and the Atlas arcology owns everything else. The only thing that matters is survival, unless you decide that family matters more.
Relationships: Blake Belladonna/Yang Xiao Long, Qrow Branwen/James Ironwood
Comments: 19
Kudos: 38





	1. Mantle

"All right, kids," Qrow drawled, slouching down into his chair. "Good news and bad news."

Around the battered table, heads raised to look at him as he continued. "The Wizard has a job that he says is a good match, but it's in a shitty part of town. Somebody's gang war went on long enough to draw down the Grimm, and the whole place got hollowed out months ago. And if that wasn't spiffy enough, it's halfway up the ass of the Atlas arcology."

Yang set her multitool down, flexing her hand with a click of servos. "I thought you said there was bad news."

Weiss was already speccing scenarios in her head, guaranteed, but she was more reserved out loud. "How much does it pay?"

He sighed. "Enough that I'm talking to you about it, even though I don't like it."

Blake was the only one not at the table, perched up on her bunk instead. Her chin was pillowed on one arm, golden eyes narrowed. "Stealth or force?"

He glanced up to her. "Yes."

Ruby was actually bouncing on her chair, and she raised her hand. "Will it give me a chance to test out the new ammo?"

"I mean. I _hope_ not, but probably."

"Yessss." She subsided, still vibrating slightly.

Qrow rolled his eyes, but that was close enough to quorum. "Okay. Here's what I know." He leaned forward, sweeping a patch clear of food wrappers and memory cards, and started sketching out the details.

* * *

Ruby peered out the empty window frame, file cabinets and cubicle walls bulking behind her like jumbled dinosaur bones. The buildings in this neighborhood were tall--they were eight floors up, and the walls still loomed on either side like a canyon. Everything on the street below was dark, silent, still.

Or it had been. "Pack of Grimm coming east," Qrow said over the comms. "Couple of crawlers on the south side building, too. Who forgot to think happy thoughts?"

"Weiss," came the answer in unison. Ruby snickered.

"I am _working_ here," Weiss said testily from the depths of the office behind Ruby. She was tucked among the servers, eyes flicking back and forth behind her visor, hands playing over an intricate keyboard only she could see. "And I need time. This file system is a mess."

Ruby jumped in before Qrow could give orders. "Can I? Please?"

She could hear the grimace, but then, "Fine. Your show."

"Eee! Okay. Bumblebee on the garden path, with a rose trellis. Ice princess in the castle."

"I can _not_ with the code names," Weiss muttered.

"Then don't ignore me next time I'm making them up," Ruby said smugly. And then shut up, because the pack was coming into her field of vision, loping along with heads swinging side to side. They were broad-shouldered, bigger than any dogs that hadn't been grossly genemodded. They were also alert, looking for something. Ruby hummed under her breath as she swung her scope up to look for the crawlers. Not visible yet; they must be small or still behind cover.

Below, a streak of leather and bronze tore out of a gaping storefront, plowing into the second Grimm and knocking it snarling onto its side. Yang came down on top and hammered punches to its body, hitting for soft meat--or whatever you could call the spongy shadow-stuff where meat should be. It had structural integrity, at least, and something like a ribcage, though its joints were too smooth and supple to really feel like an animal as it twisted to snap at her. Its jaws closed but she was already vaulting over, slamming down one last punch to send a slug into its armored skull as she pounced at the next one.

The leader turned with a howl, a sound that went straight down to some cave-dwelling place in the guts and said _something out there wants to eat me_. Ruby had always wondered if real wolves used to sound like that, though Uncle Qrow said not really. The leader's hindquarters bunched, ready to spring, but then a shadow was floating down from the nearby stalk of a streetlight to land on its back. Blake was hard to see even when you knew she was there, and it wasn't just the subdermals. Her legs grapevined with the Grimm's hindquarters like it wasn't even a thing, and her arms twined around its throat. The monomolecular edge of her blade gleamed and slashed.

Ruby's stomach was tense but excitement fizzed in her blood as she watched it unfold. Her foot tapped, answering a beat in her head. She glanced up to check the side of the building one more time, and there they were--two six-legged creatures, the size of middling dogs but skittering along the wall with ease. She leaned out, bracing the butt of her weapon against the window frame behind her. Breathed in, sighted, fired on the exhale. The front crawler exploded in a haze of shadow and the other one darted upward _fast_ , vanishing into a gaping window.

"Aw, dammit." She stuck her tongue out at it, then glanced back to check the street below. The Grimm that Yang had knocked over was staggering up, woozy but saved by its thick skull. In front, the leader was thrashing and rolling, trying to crush the woman clinging to its back. Ruby's foot tapped faster as she started lining up the next shot.

*

Ironwood was almost off-shift for the night. Technically he'd been done an hour ago, but being deputy chief of security at Atlas arcology meant you worked the hours that came. And he could never bring himself to skip the periphery office--no matter that technically, Mantle problems weren't his problems.

"Evening," he said to let the two operators know he was there, and they glanced back to nod acknowledgment. "Anything happening in the border sectors?" Atlas kept most of its eyes turned inward, but security drones were cheap and largely ran themselves. They only needed minimal human babysitting to monitor possible anomalies outside the walls.

"Nothing major," answered the lead tech. "Skirmish in sector MA12, probably gangs. The floater just arrived and it's merging data streams." A street map filled the big screen. Bright lines showed the last recorded building foundations, sketched over with breaks and obstructions updated by drone sweeps. At the center of one street was a purple blob, with a scatter of red dots coming in from the corner and a fainter red haze flickering around the purple.

She was probably right that it was nothing, but he was here anyway. "Show me."

The tech nodded, already casting up the feed. On screen, a melee was just breaking up, with one--no, two--small figures darting for cover as bullets thudded into the building behind them. One of them made it easily, but the other was still rolling through shards of glass when it fetched up against a Grimm. Ironwood tensed at the proximity: _Get out of there_. He clenched his hand and kept silent, and the figure looped a hard punch from its back that forced open the Grimm's jaws. The fist rammed into its mouth and jerked twice. Chunks of shadow blew out the back of its head, and the girl (the impression had solidified) lunged for cover before the next burst of gunfire came in from off-screen.

"The other group?" he asked. Calm. It wasn't his job to intervene, not here--and more importantly, they might have it handled. For their sake, he hoped they finished up quickly. A firefight in an infested neighborhood was bound to escalate, splashing around exactly the kind of psychic energy that would draw more Grimm.

The camera took a couple of seconds to acquire the newcomers, a handful of adults working their way closer along a concrete barrier. Their leader popped up to check position and fire, and a smear of streetlight caught his red hair. "Droogs." That answered one question, but the first crew didn't match anything in Ironwood's mental database. (He felt the formal query constructing itself and killed it, not wanting the extra details until a half-made decision had crystallized. Leave no traces.)

*

Ruby hadn't been spotted, but also didn't have a good angle on the approaching gang members that had just made themselves known. Neither Blake nor Yang had been badly hit, but they were pinned down by gunfire for the moment, with the two remaining pack members starting to circle for position.

"Transferring files," Weiss said over comms. "What did you step in out there? There's encrypted traffic all over the place, and some of it is definitely Atlas."

Right on the heels of that, Ruby saw a rapid pattern-flash of colored light at ground level, drawing her eye up the street in the direction the Grimm had come from. Two more gang members, hustling in the distraction with something that looked suspiciously like a rocket launcher. And they were tilting it down to aim--no time to get fancy. "Flanking. On it," she said. Then she was tipping out the window, falling into rose petals and the scream of the wind.

*

Back in the half-dim of the security room, a wild streak of static cut across the camera view. Ironwood, keyed into the feed now, felt the invisible shoulder-tap of an alarm as something tripped the wrong set of sensors.

"Semblance," the second tech confirmed. "There's nobody licensed in that sector."

The camera caught up to a new figure--the smallest yet, were they just printing them in miniature now?--cleaving through a piece of small artillery. With what looked like, god help him, a scythe.

"Gotcha, roaches," the first tech said with satisfaction. Ironwood felt the indicators on the floater trip over, shiver of the launch starting--

" _Stop!_ " His voice cracked through the room, making the tech jerk. The flinch transmitted through her link, wobbling the drone as it fired. The onboard systems corrected swiftly, but the fraction of a second allowed enough time for instinct or warning, and the girl with the scythe vanished in a swirl of hell-confetti just before the missile struck.

Time seemed to slow, delivering itself in a handful of snapshots. A bloom of incandescent fury at what had almost happened. The sudden jangle of a proximity alert as the drone sensed danger. Its camera jerked up, catching a figure hurtling toward it from somewhere above. A man with dark hair and garnet-colored eyes, face a mask of calm, his whole body curled into a perfect arc bringing down the sword in his hand.

The camera and map feeds froze for a second before vanishing altogether, leaving behind only the thud of Ironwood's pulse in his ears.

One breath. Two.

"What," he said precisely, "was that?"

"A nest of rogue psychics," the lead tech said defensively. "Sir, I--"

"You tried to gun down a child. Who was outside our borders. With no Atlas personnel or property in danger. We were not involved until you involved us--by, I repeat, attempting to gun down a child."

She opened her mouth one more time to object, but something she saw in Ironwood's face stopped her. Instead she clenched her jaw and nodded, her expression sullen.

"Pack your things; you're done. I'll finish the shift." Ironwood moved forward to trade places with her, eyes skimming over her as if she had stopped existing. The other tech kept his eyes fixed on his terminal like his life depended on it.

So much for sleeping tonight.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First fic. Figuring some things out as I go! Comments appreciated, but please be kind. Or at least not too snarky.


	2. Atlas

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Being a good dad is hard.

The wake-up juice was wearing thin by the time Ironwood reached the apartment. As the door slid shut behind him, he closed his eyes, just for a moment, and felt the weight roll off his shoulders. The door light dimmed and brightened again, a friendly little wave.

"Greetings, father!" Penny's voice was cheerful. "Please avoid the center of the room." Actual sunlight fell on the floor there, piped down by shafts and mirrors. It was just fading past the softness of late afternoon, dusting over a small collection of prisms and other objects.

He blinked and resumed the motion he had paused, taking off his coat. "What am I avoiding?"

"An experiment," she said judiciously. "I will explain more when it is finished. I believe it will take several days."

Well, it wasn't as if he was using the space for anything better. Outside the areas she occupied, the apartment looked spartan and barely lived-in. "I'll keep it in mind. And I'm sorry I didn't come home last night--there was a problem I had to take care of."

She could point out with absolute justice how often that happened, but somehow she never did. Instead, she said, "There is food in the kitchen. I will heat it to your favorite lukewarm temperature."

He snorted. "I think that was a dig. Why don't you heat it to what you think is a _proper_ temperature, and tell me about your day?"

"Excellent," she agreed. He brushed his hand across the speaker as he passed it, and her voice picked up smoothly from the next one in the kitchen, a steady stream of chatter as he stretched with a muffled groan and then sat.

Her latest studies passed through a skipping-stone list of topics: there was something about tesselation, a detour into parametric curves, a note on the current taxonomy of Grimm, a jump to swarm theory. He had long since accepted that he couldn't keep up with all the leaps she made, and just let it flow by. Along the way, he remembered how to breathe again.

He was almost done eating when her tone shifted. "I said something today that made the technicians uncomfortable." At his raised brow and motion for her to go on, she said, "I asked why there are so few Faunus in Atlas."

_Ah._ Part of him dreaded where this might be going; a slightly larger part wished he'd been there to watch them squirm. "What did they say?"

"They said that anyone could live in Atlas, so if there were fewer Faunus here, that they probably liked other places better. But I heard one of them telling a joke recently that seemed to say that Faunus were... dirty? I asked about that. They said it was complicated and that I should talk to Dr. Watts."

The food had lost its flavor. James folded his hands and looked steadily at the speaker. "Before you tell me what Dr. Watts said, what do you think?"

Her voice was slower when she answered. (It didn't have to be. She moved so _fast_ , now, but had learned to pace her speech to make people comfortable.) "I think... I am missing something. The Faunus Strain was highly transmissible, but past the first generation it has propagated only through inheritance. The data are very clear. But people act as if it says something else. That does not make sense to me."

"It doesn't make sense," he agreed. "Some of it is about fear. The Faunus Strain was the first major runaway genemod, and it changed the way people thought about their place in the world. Being human suddenly seemed less stable than it had been. Many people never faced that fear, and so every time they see Faunus, they feel it again. That makes people do ugly things."

"I see," she said, and his heart ached at how dubious her tone was. He hoped she never really understood. There was more he could say, much more, but some opinions weren't safe to share. "Are any of the lab techs Faunus?"

"No. I do not think I can understand without talking to some Faunus, but none of the people I am allowed to talk to are Faunus. So I believe I will have to wait to make my mind up."

"I think that's smart." He wanted to let a breath out, but that wasn't the last hit.

"I did talk to Dr. Watts. I wanted to check my assumptions first, so I requested data about the numbers of Faunus living in Atlas and Mantle. Most of my requests were unanswered, so I did a simple interpolation and explained my model to him." Ironwood almost smiled at the tartness in her voice, but the unease from earlier was growing.

"Dr. Watts did not answer my question very directly. But he said if I was thinking about questions like that, I was ready to work on harder problems. He gave me a new logic puzzle to work on." She outlined it for him quickly--it was like a higher-level version of one of those old riddles about foxes and cabbages and goats and how to transport them across a river with nobody being eaten. Except the parameters on this were strangely specific...

It clicked for him all at once, and he stood up. "Penny," he interrupted her, "I need to call Dr. Watts. Could you give us some privacy?"

"Of course," she said at once. "Could you remind him that I would very much like to talk to some more people? I think it would help with many things."

He closed his eyes and chose his words carefully. Atlas was always listening, even when they said they weren't. _Especially_ when they said they weren't. "I'll remind him. You know that it may not be cleared."

She didn't answer--not quite a sulk, but honestly all the response that prevarication deserved. He found himself refastening his jacket as he moved into the side office to make the call. As if, somehow, the armor of a uniform would make this conversation any better.

*

The call connected immediately. Arthur's lean face was calm, his appearance neat and well-groomed as it always was in the lab. "James, how nice. What has you sending me high-priority messages at this hour?"

"You gave Penny a _prison planning_ task to work on. As a game."

"Did she say that?" The doctor's brows lifted, blandly curious.

"She didn't have to. I read the reports, Arthur, even the ones you try to route around me."

"Such a studious little soldier." Watts leaned forward, lacing his fingers and smiling slightly. "Then you should know it's not a game. It's a high-level optimization problem, very tricky. Lots of resources, all those little factions to balance against each other. It's worthy of her considerable talents."

"She's not a prop for your projects. You help with her training, but that does _not_ give you the right to enlist her into all this." He waved a hand, indicating the vast sterile maze of the Atlas arcology that surrounded both of them. Distantly, he heard that his voice was rising, told himself to rein his temper back.

Watts knew he had scored a hit; it showed in the gleam of his hooded eyes. "I'm terribly sorry if I overstepped, James. Perhaps if you were qualified to oversee more of her education..." He trailed off, but Ironwood didn't take the bait, and after a moment the other man continued. "I'll tell her to stop working on it, since you don't like it. I expect she'll be disappointed."

"She'll get over it."

"As you say. But you can't keep her in picture books forever. She'll stagnate, and if that happens, she'll eventually go the same way as the rest of them. And that would be a shameful waste of resources."

There was a kernel of truth in there, but Ironwood would deal with it later, when he felt less like smashing something. "Good night," he said, and cut the call before he could botch things any further.

* * *

She was walking down twelve hallways, she was mapping the forbidden sections of the library, she was in the living room studying how the moonlight fell on the floor under the skylight. She was listening to her father's vitals as he slept.

There was a time when Penny had found it confusing to be in many places at once. Now, she found it hard to remember the parts before.

The Atlas intranet's VR mapping had a brightly soulless aesthetic, all chrome and glass and lens flares and white gray white gray _boring_ . Penny had filtered it for her own processing (and strictly for herself, after the unicorn incident). She roamed the routers and sub-nets surrounded by bright calligraphy, most of it spelling out _Entrance not allowed._ (A tech once told her that nobody liked a nosy AI, one of those jokes that she eventually realized was not a joke.)

Today the overlay was clockwork, and she was using it to time a security breach. The primary interface between the Atlas network and the outside world rendered as a whirring fortress, a tightly monitored fractal combing pandemonium into orderly traffic. All the personal messages, database queries, advertising, entertainment, commerce, on and on in ceaseless packages. Every one was inspected before passing in either direction--returned or filtered or unaltered, nothing escaped the interlocking gears without a decision.

Except... over many cycles of watching, she had found places where the mechanism stuttered. In lower-priority areas, sometimes things backed up. Sometimes, a watcher came along and unplugged the queue without actually inspecting each packet. It took superhuman vigilance or luck to see it once, and even greater patience or pattern-finding skills to predict where it would happen again.

Penny had a great deal of patience, and she was very good at patterns.

She was in the small quiet room that only she knew about, checking that nothing had moved. She was at the gateway router, preparing to lose a part of herself.

She had thought very hard about what to send. A ribbon of information, rolled up and compressed until it was nothing more than a glittering seed. Then the seed was enfolded in a small puzzle-box that looked no different than the other traffic once it was shut. "Come back soon," she told it. And dropped it into the flow, watching it vanish into low-priority traffic.

Then, carefully and with some trepidation, she forgot that she had done it.

* * *

The world was a tumbling void, no anchor point, no fixed axis of sensation. Vertigo rolled through James, worse than physical. His skeleton was knitting itself together and it _hurt_ , every joint a senseless clashing of surfaces, every fiber a tatter that went nowhere. Nothing connected, and there were no borders that made sense, no end to the frantic search of his mind to find a motive center.

He heard voices, murmuring and indistinct. Smelled smoke and disinfectant and burning flesh and the sour spill of viscera, all jumbled together.

He had a skeleton, but it was turning on itself, bones twisting under the muscle and servos whining discordantly. He had skin, and if he could just remember which side of it was the inside and which was the outside, maybe he could find his body again, and stop the howling of alarms in his ears.

He woke, tangled in the bedsheets, dim light from the other room outlining furniture that he would recognize in another minute. His shoulders ached, his hips and knees, everything strung taut.

He rolled up to a sitting position, ignoring the fresh twinges, ignoring the chill of cooling sweat on his skin. He rested his elbows on his knees and leaned forward, staring down at his hands. Tipped one of them up and touched it with his other hand, just the tip of one finger to his palm. Repeated the motion, switching sides, back and forth. He focused only on that. By the time he reached twenty, he was back, settled into the feeling that these were _his_ hands, his body. Both sides of it.

He let his head hang low for a minute, rolling it back and forth and wincing as his neck crackled. Scrubbing his left hand over his face, he said, "How long?"

"Three hours and forty-one minutes," Penny answered immediately. "Would you like some tea?" That was definitely a dig about all the coffee. He felt his mouth quirk, not quite a smile.

"Maybe later. I need to do some thinking right now, so I'll talk to you in a bit, okay?"

He loaded all the privacy protocols he was supposed to have and then he loaded the other set, the ones that used log tampering and back doors that weren't supposed to exist. He took out the half-formed question from the night before and let it finish. It spun into a fine net of passive queries, something to trawl the gray and black-market sites where a whole second economy churned. He needed the kind of skills and hardware that you could find in the best corporate ops--but he needed them unchipped, off the books, and outside the walls. And somehow trustworthy enough to handle all the secrets he could never tell.

It was an impossible task. In the dead hours of the morning, he sat with that and with the truth that the symptoms were getting worse. He called up the memory of the incident, played it again. It was too much to risk, but there was no more time. He thought one last time of those garnet eyes, that glimpse of the descending angel of death. He sent the query.


	3. Beacon and Amity

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The team trains, meets new people, and enjoys the novelty of doing legal business. Qrow takes some shit.

The Beacon Street Co-Op was a venerable wreck. It started life as a housing project, passed through various criminal hands, and these days it had found its way back to a kind of community center again. Weiss called it "finishing school for thugs," but only out of earshot of Glynda.

Team RWBY was grouped around tables--Yang refused to think of them as school desks--watching footage of their last job while cold rain pounded the outer walls and the heaters struggled to keep up. The recordings came courtesy of two small camera drones that Weiss had recently added to her arsenal. She called them Special and Snowflake, which Yang had to admit was a pretty good preemptive self-burn.

The playback paused at the moment where Yang and Blake reached cover and started engaging with the arriving gang members. "Now," Glynda said, "what happens next?"

"A lot of broken glass," Yang offered. She was still picking it out of her hair in the shower. And her arm hurt like _balls_ , but there was no point in bringing that up until they had the money to rebuild it.

"We got scattered," Blake said, sitting on top of a table in back. Her clothing today ran the whole range from charcoal to matte black, close-fitting under a long jacket. "There were hits coming from too many directions--we hadn't finished mopping up Grimm when the Droogs arrived."

"But I sliced a rocket launcher in half straight down the middle, that was pretty sweet," pointed out Ruby. She had her boots up on the chair next to her and was chowing down on a bag of something bite-sized and unhealthy. She had a bit of singed hair from the close call with the missile, but said she was getting ready to dye it anyway.

Glynda canted her head to one side, light glinting off her glasses in a way that made Yang instinctively slide lower in her seat. "Yes," said Glynda. "It also drew you out of position without a backup plan, leaving Weiss exposed. Who might have been the target all along, if the Droogs were watching the building. So full points for your bisection skills, somewhat less than full points for preserving your teammates' lives."

Qrow looked up from cleaning Harbinger's gears. Yang had clocked him about ten minutes late, definitely wearing last night's clothes, but not notably smelling of whiskey: call that forecast partly cloudy. "That one's on me," he said. "I told Ruby to stick with four-person tactics for now, otherwise she could've tagged me in."

Glynda shot him a look. "I'll get to you. First, we're going to go through all the ways this could have gone terribly wrong."

Ruby had visibly deflated. "Okay, yes, Weiss dying would be bad. You don't have to be mean."

"You're paying me to be mean about this," Glynda said crisply. "Also, I enjoy it. Now, talk me through three ways this could have gotten worse from the moment you spotted the launcher, then tell me what you could do about it."

And they were off, Weiss helpfully backseat driving her own fictional demise. Much as these sessions made Yang's head hurt, she had to admit that they were making her sharper. The way things were headed in Mantle, they were all going to need it.

* * *

Amity was the biggest online marketplace that had ever existed, cheerfully lawless and largely ignored by the authorities as long as the consequences stayed quiet. The virtual club scene got intense, but Ruby could never quite get the hang of it. She preferred live music, bruises and all. But there was something fun about catching the view from above, all the packed avatars and their physics-defying moves.

There was someone else at her usual perch, a girl about Ruby's height--long thick hair, a skirt with some twirl to it, definitely on the retro side but a cute style. Ruby's avatar had a red hooded cloak that billowed around her knees, picnic basket slung over one arm with a freshly-cleaned wolf's skull in it. She didn't feel like turning back now; Uncle Qrow had business and she had a while to kill. So she took her place at the railing next to the redhead. "Hey."

She expected a nod, maybe a grunt--certainly not the lit-up grin she got. "Salutations!" Like it was the greatest day ever, just because she'd said hi.

Ruby grinned back, because it was hard not to. "Looking for someone down there?"

The girl shook her head, stirring the ribbon in her hair. "That is a complicated question to answer, so I will avoid it. But look at this." Her hands sketched at the air, pulling up two pictures to overlay on the crowd below: a school of shifting silver minnows and a cathedral window of jewel-toned stained glass.

Ruby stared at the pictures for a second, then laughed. "Oh! I see. Um... Needs more glitter, I think?" She stepped closer and dug in her basket. From next to the wolf's skull she pulled out a picture to add to the slices, an explosion of rainbow dust that would cling to everything if this was the real world.

The other girl hummed, pleased. She clapped her hands together and the images morphed into one, an abstract spray of color that twisted in the air like a multidimensional kaleidoscope. "Yes, exactly." She turned to look at Ruby more directly. "Dancing is not required up here, is it? I would prefer to avoid that until I figure out how it works."

"Nah, you're fine. I mean, nobody's going to _stop_ you dancing in the rafters. I just like to people-watch. I'm Ruby, by the way."

That brilliant smile came back. "I am Penny. It is excellent to meet you."

"Same. Hey, I was going to go hit the combat arcade--they just upgraded the rendering and I've got a crazy gun thing I want to try. You interested?"

"Oh, yes. Though it is possible I will not be good at it."

"We can fix that," Ruby said, linking her arm through Penny's. "C'mon, let's go find some tough-boy gamers and take their lunch money."

*

Ironwood didn't spend much time in the public areas of the net these days, and he had forgotten how loud and colorful even the shady bars of Amity could be. He had dressed down, a vaguely male avatar with an average build and a liquid hematite texture. At first glance, it looked like one of the default skins the network assigned to people who hadn't spent the money to customize. It was the next best thing to invisible.

The man across from him in the virtual booth was running on a different aesthetic. He was lean, clothing mostly in gray and burgundy, with an occasional cross motif and an oil-slick sheen like feathers on his slightly mussed dark hair. Not identical to his actual body--at least that single flash that Ironwood had seen--but the connections were there.

He was reading the list of specifications now, enough interest in the job proposal to ask for the details. His eyes (brown, much less distinctive than the real thing) flicked back up to Ironwood's face. "Don't think I'm complaining, but all this stuff is legal."

"Yes."

Qrow waited a beat, then smirked. "Okay then."

Ironwood turned one hand palm-up, a tiny shrug. "I can take the job to a reputable dealer who will still shit-source as many of the components as they think they can get away with. Or I can take my lumps on the market here, the quality averages out, and I skip the paper trail."

Qrow was stopped from answering by the arrival of a new avatar--a busty silhouette of molten gold with a lion's mane of amber hair and trickles of flame sizzling in her footsteps. One arm ended at the elbow in what appeared to be a pair of jagged-edged shears. Ironwood blinked as she leaned in over Qrow's shoulder, draping the normal-ish arm around the other man's neck. "Whatcha doing?" she asked.

"Trying to keep a roof over your head. For which it would help if this guy took me for a competent professional. Do you mind?"

"Nope," she grinned, blowing a bubble of gum that popped into a tiny puff of flame and a curl of smoke. She critically inspected Qrow's avatar and brushed at a strand of feather-hair that was hanging over his eyes. Qrow reached up without looking to bat her hand away. And Ironwood sat there, trying to figure out why the bottom had just dropped out of his stomach--because of the obvious moment of warm familiarity, or because his hand wanted to reach out and clear that same lock of hair.

He didn't know if it was one or both. It didn't matter. He was glad for the bland features of his avatar, keeping the whole thing smothered. A second later he had something else to focus on, as the golden girl's shadow detached. No, _not_ her shadow, an entirely separate avatar along for the ride. One who had been watching him the whole time, he was now sure. _Concentrate. These people are dangerous._

He'd let the silence hang too long. "Need a minute?" Not inviting her to join them, because honestly he wasn't sure he could keep up right now. His nerves were rawer than he'd expected, just being here.

Qrow saved him, all unknowing, with an eyeroll. "Nope." Tilted his head back to look at the golden girl (fist jammed in the Grimm's mouth, recoil kicking as she blasted out its head). "We'll talk later. Go do... what is it you do, anyway? Blow all your money on ridiculous cosmetics. Hell, if you get really stumped for fun, maybe stop by a grocery store."

"Mmm, yeah. One of those things might happen. Byeee..." The last was tossed over her shoulder to both of them as she left, hips swinging and shear-arm snapping to the beat of the pop song playing on the nearby dance floor. Two breaths later, the extra shadow slid off the wall and followed along with her.

Qrow turned back with a sigh, slouching lower in his seat. "About that..."

"Family?" Ironwood knew he shouldn't ask, but it came out anyway. Qrow hesitated a second, then nodded. And stupidly, Ironwood was certain in that moment that these people were the ones he needed. He tried to set that aside, kept his voice level. "As I was saying. If the quality checks out on the delivery end..."

* * *

"So that's the job," Qrow finished, long legs kicked out in front of him. They were all offline and back in the Situation Room--which was what Ruby had dubbed the apartment's living room, which was also its kitchen and half a spare bedroom. When space was tight, sometimes the right labeling was key. "Thoughts?"

"I should have gone grocery shopping," Yang said, half muffled by the fridge. "Weiss, do you even _like_ food?"

"I think he likes you," Blake said.

Ruby stopped texting on her scroll and leaned forward, chair legs banging down onto the floor. " _Like_ like, or...?"

"Mm." Blake made a noncommittal noise, but the corner of her mouth quirked up.

Qrow stared at her. "What, in all our time together, has given you the idea I need help getting laid?"

"Is that a rhetorical question?" Weiss asked.

"Savage," murmured Yang, returning to the table with her scavenging.

"You two," he pointed at them, "can fuck right off. You," the finger swiveled to Blake. "Anything relevant to add?"

She tilted her head to one side and was silent for a few moments. Nobody rushed her. "Tightly wound," she said finally. "But not first-time nerves. Not one of the board regulars, I don't think, but he tuned out the chaos. And that avatar..." She tossed a questioning look to Weiss, who nodded.

"Wasn't nearly as cheap as it looked. You could find the base design anywhere, but the lines were well-executed and there were these little touches in the programming... it's hard to explain without the code, but it verged on artistic if you're into that sort of thing."

There was a muffled noise from Yang, but someone kicked her to be quiet. Weiss narrowed her eyes but continued at Qrow's _go on_ gesture. "Probably corporate. Gang middle management likes having their bodyguards." Blake nodded agreement.

Qrow swept one last look around. "No major warning signs, decent money, we take it?" He waited for the nods, then shrugged. "Great. You all need the practice being legal anyway, and we should resupply before taking any big Grimm hunts. Spread the buys around, no lump transactions just in case someone else is watching. And Weiss, if you dig up an address on our Tinman, you send it my way." Privacy was for people who weren't likely to stab you in the back.


	4. Neighborhood problems

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Yang gets dating advice from Nora, Qrow snoops on the new employer, and Weiss and Blake deal with problems at Beacon.

The gym at Beacon was in keeping with the rest of the place: not a single spotless surface anywhere, and it smelled faintly like ass thanks to the bad ventilation. Yang loved it. She grunted as the bar dropped back into the brackets, rolling her shoulders as she stepped back from the final set of squats. "Hey," she asked her lifting partner. "How did you and Ren get together?"

Nora laughed. "I'm still not sure he knows we're dating. Why?"

Yang didn't have a subtle way to get at it, especially not while she was workout-stupid, so she just shrugged and said it. "I think I've maybe kinda got a thing for Blake." She considered that as they changed plates. "Like, a lot. But she's..."

"Skittish?" suggested Nora.

"I was gonna say private, but yeah." She shut up as Nora cranked out her set, her glutes flexing under the skintight pink workout shorts. Hobbies included: blowing shit up, leg day. "Anyway, she's like that. And I'm..."

"Subtle as a hammer?" Nora was so helpful.

"Whose side are you on?" She wasn't wrong, though, Yang knew.

"Hey, I like hammers. But I was working on Ren for _years_ before he realized I was serious, so I may not be your best bet for advice."

They started setting up the next exercise, Yang glumly contemplating her loveless future. Russel and Sky wandered by, eyeing the squat cage wistfully, but the combined Yang-Nora stinkeye chased them off.

"I just think I might've friendzoned myself, y'know? Like, we're a good team, and I know I shouldn't fuck with that. But dude, she is lethal, and it's fucking _hot_."

"So tell her how you feel," Nora shrugged. "Seriously. I know it's terrifying, but after about a dozen times, it stopped being scary and just turned into a true thing that I wanted to say out loud, whether he believed me or not." For a second, a faraway half-smile softened her face, then it slid into a frown as she scooted to one side and took a more critical eye. "Though, also seriously, stick your butt out more. Nobody's going to love you with deadlift form like that."

* * *

It was heading for the hard part of winter, days getting short, and the clouds had been sullenly spitting snow and rain since noon. Qrow didn't mind the weather, always up for a stakeout that kept him close to the sky. He had nested in the skeleton of a high-rise, its construction started in better days and probably never going to finish now. It was across the street from his target, a small apartment halfway up the building in a respectable neighborhood that was just starting to slide downhill.

This was his second day of snooping and he'd been watching since morning, and there was no movement--not on visual, not thermals, not even a rat stirring in the place as far as he could tell. But maybe the Tinman kept odd hours, so Qrow stayed put, listening to the wind groan through the girders and feeling the vibrations come up through the pad he was lying on. He had gear to shield him from the worst of the weather and enough heating packs to last for several more hours, though not exactly in high comfort. His scroll was switched to vibrate on emergencies only, and it was easy to drift.

*

"What do you want for your birthday?" Clover was stretched out beside him, arms folded behind his head, one elbow brushing Qrow's shoulder in a way he tried to pretend wasn't distracting.

Qrow cut a glance over at him. They were on a high ledge barely big enough for two, and the warm night had been dragging by. Clover had spent it pointing out constellations whenever he wasn't taking his turn on watch. He was so fucking chatty; it was annoying. "Why would you ask that? It's ages away."

"If you have something better to talk about, just say the word."

Qrow rolled his eyes. Below, night insects sang. There was a drop of sweat winding ticklishly down his side, but he'd have to elbow Clover to get to it. He settled in to ignore it, let the minutes pass. Eventually, he said, "Ribs. Grilled so the fat's gone crispy on the edges, you know? Mac and cheese, beans, drown it all in sauce." Clover hummed, and Qrow panned slowly over the windows below. "Not to kill anyone for a few days."

"Sounds good," Clover agreed. He sounded calm, sleepy even, and Qrow was just getting ready to be mad about that when Clover shifted suddenly, rolling up on his side so that he was looking down at Qrow.

The ledge suddenly felt much smaller, and Qrow's mouth went dry.

"But do you want anything for your birthday that I could get you?" His breath tickled the hair at Qrow's temple.

Qrow stole another look at him, feeling his pulse too close to his skin. He could see the gleam of Clover's eyes in the moonlight. Even he wasn't dense enough to miss the flirting, these last few weeks. What was the worst that would happen if he just... said it? He licked the inside of his lip, opened his mouth...

Movement flickered in the scope, a gate starting to roll open. "Playtime," Tyrian said on the radio.

And there was his fucking luck. Qrow swallowed the words, told himself to stick with what he was good at, and curled his finger around the trigger.

*

Middle of the night, now. He'd watched lights flicker up and down the building as people in the neighboring units came home, ate their dinners, reached for companionship or for solitude, and eventually went to sleep. Nothing in Tinman's place, just the same bland furniture and the same message light winking by the door.

If he was really worried, he'd give it a couple more days of this treatment. But his gut, which he trusted about these things, said that the place looked uninhabited. He had queried the network a few hours back and found advertising photos for the building that showed nearly identical views to what he could see through the window. Prefurnished, drab, just like the name and mid-level accounting job attached to it on Weiss' trace.

_Fuck it._ Qrow took his time disassembling his little nest, slow with the cold and with no urgent reason to risk mistakes. He took the descent and entry the same way, treated the building security like it had been designed by someone much better than the hack who had clearly programmed the camera patterns.

When the door opened, letting him into the unlit apartment, he wasn't surprised by the stale taste on the cool air. That message light by the entry was still blinking, and he was careful as he tapped into the little touchscreen. The logs showed no door access in the last month--other than his own, which he deleted.

Due diligence completed, he indulged his curiosity. It didn't take long: nothing in the fridge, nothing but a change of clothes in the drawers. He came back to the unopened note in the home system. No point in coming all this way to _not_ read the guy's mail.

It said: _If there's something you want to know, you could ask._ That was it, and a secure messenger ID.

In the midnight dim of the apartment, Qrow smiled, showing all his teeth. He let himself out just as carefully, glad that he hadn't half-assed it on the way in. He waited until he was miles away, not far from one of the usual bars, before he messaged the ID: _Why spend that much money on an avatar, just to look cheap?_

No answer came--not shocking, given the hour, but he could admit he was a little disappointed. He put that minor mystery on the shelf, next to the stakeout ghosts, and went to find company. Somebody was always lonely, this time of night.

* * *

Blake and Weiss were playing chess in the big open room on the first floor of Beacon. It had the same old-meets-new whiplash that permeated the whole structure: corroding pressed tin ceiling overhead, glowing screen of Grimm hunts on the wall, and a truly mismatched sprinkle of chairs and tables where the neighborhood's finest could study, couch-surf, and lick their wounds.

It was also a good place to keep a casual eye on who came and went, and that was one of Blake's best hobbies. She and Weiss had played a game and a half without exchanging more than five words, a totally impossible feat with the rest of the team. Not that she held it against them, but sometimes you just needed space.

Sometimes you didn't get it. "Incoming," murmured Weiss, and a few seconds later someone leaned heavily on the back of Blake's chair.

"Hey, gorgeous." Cardin. _Lovely._ "Haven't seen you around much the last few days."

"I haven't been looking for you," said Weiss, a fine line appearing between her brows as she studied the board. She was experimenting with her hair lately, and it suited her: ice blue with a partial undercut, half a dozen silver studs scattered between her nose, eyebrows, and ears. Blake didn't think the look was for the benefit of anyone in particular, but Cardin didn't do subtle let-downs.

"You should be," he said, reaching down to flick one of the pieces over with his finger. "Otherwise, who knows when I might sneak up on you?"

Blake turned her head to look up, cat ears flattening. "Leave."

Cardin noticed her for the first time and took his hand off her chair in an exaggerated recoil. "Ugh."

"Still not contagious," Blake said, dropping her eyes back to the pieces and trying to sound bored. Picking a fight here was more likely to cause problems for her than for Cardin, no matter how much she fantasized about shutting him up.

Weiss righted the downed knight, setting it in place with an audible click. She looked up at Cardin. "If this is a sales pitch for your dick, the answer is eternally no. If it's a pitch for your team--your situational awareness is garbage, your tactics are sloppy, and you can't afford my consulting rates."

"Cunt," Cardin snapped, shifting forward like he was maybe thinking of saying more. Blake half-turned in her seat and fixed him with a flat golden stare, her lips peeling back slightly from her teeth. After a second he thought better of it and raised his hands, just an easygoing guy trying to calm down a couple of overreacting females. Stepping back, he added to Weiss, "You used to be hotter," before stalking away.

Weiss looked at the board, blinking a little more rapidly than usual, her fingers tapping a quick tattoo on the table. "Sorry about that," she said after a minute.

Blake shrugged. Her good mood was gone, but she held on to a scrap of something: six months ago, they wouldn't have even been sitting here together, let alone Weiss sticking up for her. It was something.

They played in silence for the next several moves, but Blake couldn't quite settle her nerves, because Weiss kept glancing up through her eyelashes like she wanted to say something. Finally, she came out with it: "I noticed you did some more avatar mods in Amity. Very..." She sketched a hand straight up and down, no curves. "It looks good."

Blake looked up at her, startled, and then dropped her eyes again with a darker tint to her cheeks. She thought about shrugging it off, but then she thought that she and Weiss might actually qualify as friends, these days. She kind of wanted to see what more of that felt like. "I'm trying something out--just online, to see how it feels. But when we're there, I guess, I'm she or they."

Weiss' turn to glance up with slightly widened eyes, then she studiously made a move. "Cool," she said after a minute.

Blake smiled a little. It was a nice feeling, resting in that silence... and it went away a second later when one of the doors that led to the street banged open below them.

"Hey!" Two newish hunters that Blake didn't really know--Emerald and some guy?-- came in, close together and looking a bit scared. "There's a gang attack happening on a shop down the street--the guy needs help."

Blake and Weiss were already out of their chairs before they glanced at each other, and nodded in unison. Blake leaned over the railing, shrugging her coat back on. "Where?"

* * *

Tukson's Book Trade was a five minute hustle from Beacon, sandwiched in a block of shops between a grocery and a tobacco shack. The police hadn't arrived, and the two flanking stores had taken the civic-minded step of closing up tight. Tukson's front window was broken, and the whimsical winter display inside was in pieces.

The group of four hunters slowed, similar expressions of dismay on their faces. "We just stopped in to check comics," Emerald said, gnawing on her lip. "Then the bell rang again, and I didn't see who came in, but Tukson hissed at us to go get help. We don't... we don't know a lot of people at Beacon yet, we didn't know who to call." Guilt and horror seeped into her expression as they neared the silent storefront.

Weiss swallowed. "If he's still in there, he needs us right now." She drew her sword, flipped her hair back with a flick of her chin, and led the way.

Blake lingered outside, looking up and down the street. If anyone had stayed around to watch the aftermath, they weren't being obvious about it.

"Blake?" Weiss' voice came from inside, and she could tell from the tone it was bad news. She stared for a second at the sticker on the glass of the front door. A rainbow background, a silhouette of a little head with rabbit ears: Everyone welcome here. Her eyes slipped to the other side of the doorway where the real marker was, a set of waist-height scratches in the paint that looked random. They weren't--the first one meant _safe house_ , and below it was another mark belonging to the Fangs. The second mark had been scuffed out, but--she knelt swiftly to check--there was a bit of grime and the damage didn't actually look fresh.

She straightened and went in, threading through the tipped-over shelves and flaring her nostrils at the smell of burnt paper and Dust discharge. Weiss and Emerald were behind the counter, kneeling by the sprawled body of Tukson. His claws were out but they hadn't helped, to judge by the dark stain soaking his shirt and the smears on the nearby baseboard. "No good," said Weiss, looking up. She looked a little sick. Emerald had a hand over her mouth, red eyes wide.

"Guys?" said Mercury, from the back room. Three more steps took Blake through that doorway to size up the space. It was a tightly but neatly packed storeroom, and compared to the front of the shop it was undisturbed. All but the space on one wall where a bookcase was knocked aside, exposing a compartment that was now conspicuously empty. Only a few bits of debris remained on the floor, and Mercury bent to pick one up, holding up a slim cartridge. "Dust. Was he...?"

Blake lifted her head, ears twitching. "Quiet." A few sounds from the building filtered in--somebody's overactive bass several floors up, a television playing, a faint siren... and a rustling, like wings. Noiseless, her feet carried her under the ventilation grate on the ceiling in the back of the room. A prickle crept up her spine.

Wait. _Siren._ "Cops!" Emerald called from the front.

" _Now_ they make it?" muttered Weiss, then craned her neck around the corner to look at Blake. "Is there a back door?"

"No," said Mercury, "but she just found us a way out." He stepped past Blake, hopping lightly onto a stepstool to hook his fingers through the grate.

"I'm not sure that's--" she started, but he was already pulling, tearing the lightweight metal loose and exposing the air shaft angling up beyond it.

Harsh light suddenly painted the walls out front, some of it leaking through to the back room. "Drop your weapons and come out," a voice crackled over a speaker.

"Fuck this," said Mercury, curling his hands over the rim of the opening and pulling himself smoothly up. Emerald and Weiss came ducking around the corner and ascended just as quickly.

Then it was just Blake in the empty storeroom. "I'm sorry," she said to Tukson's cooling body, and followed them up into the darkness.

The ventilation shaft was dusty and close quarters, ragged with screws and joins that didn't have to be pretty from this side. Blake toggled up the low-light vision and climbed along with the others, smelling something cold and oily. A breeze wafted down as Mercury kicked out the connecting grate to the main column that ran up the building. They could get out that way, faster than the police could follow.

Then he yelled, and she saw his outline disappear from the opening, chased by a quick spatter of shadows.

"Grimm--fuck, it's a whole flock of them. Mercury!" Emerald scuttled up the rest of the way and threw herself across the open space, sinking one of her hand-sickles into the wall on the far side and flipping the other into a pistol grip to aim.

Weiss, the last one ahead of Blake, threw a look back at her. "Up?"

"As fast as possible," said Blake. Then Weiss was clear, and Blake was at the opening, drawing her sword and staring up into a hellish maw of circling feathers and red eyes.

The next minute was a choppy vertiginous ascent, hopping from wall to glyph to wall and leapfrogging with Emerald and Mercury, the shaft alternately lit by gunfire and plunged back into darkness. When they saw the big spinning fans at the top approaching, Emerald swung Mercury up into a somersault through the air, and the guns in his boots fired heavy rounds up to blast the machinery. Weiss, leaving nothing to chance, shot the red cartridge home in her sword and chased his work with a fireball.

A few seconds later they were rolling loose on the roof, coughing or groaning but breathing sweet air. It only lasted for a moment before the cries of the remaining flock grew louder as they scratched for the opening. If there weren't already security drones on the way, they were definitely coming now.

"Fuck cops, fuck Grimm, fuck everything," Emerald gasped, staggering to her feet. "We've gotta get out of here." She looked around, uncertain for a minute, and Blake remembered they didn't know the neighborhood.

"This way," said Weiss, and that settled whether Blake was going to be a ruthless bitch and let them find their own way back. The four hunters headed off across the rooftop, looking for the nearest path down and away from further trouble.


	5. Making connections

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The first job wraps up, leaving some question marks. Penny gets strategic wisdom from Ruby.

Qrow meant to sleep late, but the chills and muscle cramps had other ideas. He was staring at the ceiling, weighing the merits of coffee all the way in the kitchen versus the flask within arm's reach. His scroll pinged to interrupt the dilemma, a reply to last night's message. He fumbled it out to answer.

_AngryBird: Why spend that much money on an avatar, just to look cheap?_

_Tinman: That was fast._

_AngryBird: Life is short. So?_

_Tinman: It was a gift, actually._

_AngryBird: Pretty nerdy admirer._

_Tinman: You have no idea._

Qrow thought that was it, but a minute later it sounded again.

_Tinman: Your terrifying relative who stopped by. Arm replacement?_

_AngryBird: Why do you ask?_

_Tinman: Cheap avatar chimeras have worse gesture fidelity, and strictly cosmetic reskins don't have that bit of lag._

_AngryBird: That's how you noticed, not why you asked._

_Tinman: When you make the delivery, she should talk to Pietro._

Qrow squinted at it for a minute, then shrugged and hauled his ass out of bed to stretch and get some coffee.

* * *

When Yang came through mid-morning, hair damp from the shower, Blake was tending the plants. That part wasn't weird--she had turned the unused bottom bunk into a miniature greenhouse, and unlike anyone else in the apartment, could keep both herbs and flowers alive. But she didn't usually sit staring at the same sprout for a solid minute, so after Yang stowed her bag and came back to a freeze frame, she was starting to wonder. "Hey. You okay? I missed the fun last night."

Blake didn't so much as twitch, kneeling there like a monastic statue with her somber clothes and her hair hanging braided down her back. She said, "I knew the guy. Tukson."

_Did I say fun last night? I meant that I'm a huge asshole._ Yang scrunched her eyes shut for a second, then leaned against the table. "Shit. I'm sorry."

Blake touched the green shoot in front of her with the tip of a finger. "We only met a couple of times, he probably wouldn't remember. I was a kid, and he came to a big protest that my parents were at." She breathed out, and Yang bit her tongue, because Blake being chatty about her past came around about as often as Ruby voluntarily doing laundry.

"Next time I saw him it was ten years later. I was with the Fangs, he was getting leaned on by the Fangs, and I remember wanting to talk to him but being too scared to make a move."

Her voice was so soft that Yang had leaned forward a bit to hear it. "Scared of who?" she said, because somehow she felt like there was a _who_ in that story that she wouldn't like.

The corners of Blake's mouth tugged down, and she shook her head. "It doesn't matter now. But recently, you know, when I started staying here... I passed the shop once with Ruby, and made up a story about a stomachache to avoid going in. Kept having her pick up books for me when she went." She finally turned to sit with her back to the wall, lacing her fingers loosely together and looking up at Yang. "I thought that if he was still mixed up in Fangs business, someone who came by the shop might recognize me. And that was trouble I didn't need. But I kept thinking, maybe next week." Her hands spread, scattering invisible dust to the wind.

Times like this, Yang wished she was something other than a meathead. "You didn't know what was gonna happen."

Blake looked away. "What if talking to him had... I don't know, helped somehow?"

"What if it didn't? You can't know." Blake's shoulders went up a bit, and Yang tried to imagine if she could handle this any worse. "Shit. Look, I'm not saying never do anything because nothing matters. I'm saying..." What _was_ she saying?

She stepped closer and squatted down, eye level with Blake. After a second, golden eyes slid up to meet hers. "I'm sorry, and it sucks--it sucks hard--that you'll never know. But if you've got any other maybes like that floating around... you don't have to sort them all out on your own. You know that, right? You're basically part of this clown car family now, and we're with you if something from your past comes up. We like you." She held out a hand, fingers wiggling invitingly.

Blake's smile was tired. "You don't know what I've done."

"Nope, and you don't gotta tell me. I mean, unless you want to, because I'll definitely listen." _Stop babbling._ "But uh, c'mon, look around. You want to see a fast fucking subject change, ask Uncle Qrow how he financed a truckload of guns and gear for himself and two teenaged nieces. We've all got our ghosts." Yang kept her hand patiently outstretched. Right this moment, she felt like she could wait here all day if it would make a difference.

Finally, slowly, Blake reached up and hooked her fingers with Yang's. Yang felt a warmth in her stomach that she couldn't quite name. Rather than trying, she smiled and squeezed. "Cool. Now, get up and help me eat the rest of the pie before Ruby wakes up."

* * *

At least from the outside, the shop didn't look like much. It was one of those little buildings where the surrounding structures had developed much more, like trees starving shorter plants of light. Both flanking storefronts were boarded up, and the elaborate graffiti suggested that police patrols didn't trouble the area often.

Overall, it was a much seedier dive than Qrow had expected from the components--some of which were decently high-end electronics, though nothing you couldn't find in any of a dozen better neighborhoods than this. He checked the address one more time, while behind him Ruby shifted from foot to foot and puffed out billows of breath into the damp frosty air. "Hurry up, Uncle Qrow," she said, a bit of a whine creeping into her voice. "It's freezing."

"Shoulda worn something warmer than a dress," Yang opined. Her bomber jacket was zipped up tight, neck retracted so far into the collar that only the top half of her head was showing.

"It's a combat skirt," Ruby hissed.

Qrow felt a headache coming on. But, yes, this was the place. "Quiet, both of you," he tossed over his shoulder, before pressing the bell. Nothing. The inside was dark, but it wasn't long after hours. He leaned on the button harder.

"Yes?" The voice came after a moment from the speaker next to him.

"Got a delivery for Pietro Polendina. That you?" Qrow raised his brows at the small video screen, which turned on a moment later to show a dark-skinned man with white hair going bald on top and a quizzical look on his face.

"It is, but I'm not expecting anything. If this is about my recent conversation with Junior, my answer is the same."

Qrow shrugged. "Don't know Junior and don't care. We were just supposed to get a set of parts for you. I'm sending the encryption key, you should check it for yourself. The guy who hired us said it's for your favorite unsolved problem."

Ruby coughed quietly, and shit, that was close to the wording but it wasn't exact. "'Scuse me. Your very favoritest unsolved problem."

After a second, the man's eyes went wide, and ten years dropped away from his face. "The service entrance is around the back. I'll be down in a minute."

It was more than a minute, but Qrow stopped being annoyed about that once the metal door rolled up high enough for him to see the chair Pietro was sitting in. "Nice rig," he said, as the man beckoned them in and then moved backward in a ripple of jointed legs.

"Needs a tune-up," Pietro said modestly, then rubbed his hands together and watched with undisguised glee as the three started moving boxes in. Several kinds of filament, a couple of them pretty exotic, some lightweight metals, a few smaller boxes of electronics... Seedy outside or not, the back room of the place had a cosily packed little suite of fabrication tools, and an equal repertoire of hand instruments hanging over a long workbench.

A metallic scraping and skittering came from under the bench, and a second later a stumpy-legged dog emerged, ears up and tongue lolling. "Gah," said Qrow, who had to do a quick steer around him. The dog slid aside a bit awkwardly, and after a second Qrow traced the noise to the small exoskeleton fitted around its hind legs.

"Ahh! Good dog," Ruby said, setting down her box and plopping down on her knees to offer her hand.

"Zwei!" Pietro called. The dog wagged its tail furiously and ignored him to make friends with Ruby, who was all for this plan.

Qrow booted her lightly on his way past. "Finish carrying first, cook up delusions of getting a dog later."

With three of them (one reluctant) on the job, it only took a few minutes. "Tea?" asked Pietro, who had apparently decided he liked them enough to start the kettle on the side table.

Qrow didn't mind, and Ruby was strongly in favor of hanging out with Zwei, so a few minutes later they were warming their hands around mismatched but clean mugs while steam curled lazily upward. "The client didn't mention it would be a surprise," Qrow said, leaning back and folding up one leg to rest the ankle on his opposite knee. "He have a habit of doing things like this?"

"No," said Pietro, drawing the word out thoughtfully. "Can't say that he does. Do you work with him regularly?"

Qrow didn't miss the way Pietro's eyes had roamed over them during the delivery, noting their weapons. Which he was never sorry about bringing just on principle, and especially not after seeing the neighborhood. "Can't say that we do," he drawled. "Might be a one-time thing--though feel free to put in a good word about how great we were. Dammit, Ruby," his cool professional act cracked when he had to lift his leg to clear a path for the dog, who barreled past in pursuit of something his niece had thrown.

"Sorry," she said, not even bothering to sound sincere.

Qrow was debating whether to be nosy some more when Yang called over from the workbench, "Hey, did you build all of these?" She was looking down at a prosthetic hand, half-assembled and frozen with the thumb and forefinger just touching each other.

"Mm, only about half of them. That one I'm redoing because the original design was flawed. Try the one by the wall--it can thumb wrestle."

"Seems like you do pretty nice work," Qrow observed, having scoped the place a little more since they'd entered. The building could most kindly be described as utilitarian, but the work area was brightly lit and seemed well-maintained if a little shabby. "Just can't bear to leave the neighborhood?"

Pietro smiled wryly, tilting his cup in his hands to make the light dance on the dark surface of the liquid. "It doesn't pay as well as you might think. Or rather, the people with the most lucrative jobs tend to be a little... terrifying?"

"Fair," Qrow said. "Bit surprised you invited us in, to be honest."

"Well, you brought me a nice surprise. And if you're determined to rob a lonely old man for the contents of his machine shop, ultimately, I probably can't stop you. Though the turrets you spotted earlier might give me a bit of satisfaction from the afterlife." Qrow, who had clocked the turrets, grinned at him.

Yang came through and dropped onto a metal folding chair, flexing her right hand. "Best four out of seven," she grumbled.

Pietro leaned over to watch her fingers curl. "Something sounds a little noisy in there. Mind if I take a look?"

"Huh? Yeah, sure," Yang said after a quick confirming glance at Qrow. She shrugged out of her jacket, Pietro reached for a shop lamp, and a few minutes later they were both pointing and muttering over the mechanical innards of her forearm.

Ruby came over and sat next to Qrow, leaning against his shoulder. "Tired now."

"Glad the dog took you for a walk," he said dryly, ruffling her hair until she flailed her arms at him to stop. "And the stuff wasn't that heavy. Maybe try waking up to join Yang at the gym one of these mornings?" Not that he was one to talk, with his recent hours. He was just stifling guilt about that when the gearheads' conversation caught his attention again.

"There's a lot of wear all along the major contact points," Pietro was saying, "and the interface with your upper arm is showing some bruising. What's your maintenance setup like?"

"Ehh. Duct tape and a nonstop stream of obscenity?" Yang sighed. "I'm halfway self-taught. So if you have some tips..."

"My big tip is to get it replaced. I recognize the model and it's excellent quality, but that was some years ago and you appear to have a, hrm, active lifestyle. I imagine there's already discomfort, and it's only a matter of time until a major break."

Yang was looking uncomfortable and started fitting the assembly back together, but Qrow sat forward to look at her with narrowed eyes. "Is he right about that?" She shrugged, studiously focusing on the small tool in her hand. "For how long?"

"I dunno. A bit."

Ruby frowned, then looked at Pietro. "Could you fix it?"

"It depends on what you mean by fix. With a full rebuild and a lot of replacement parts, it'd do all right for another year or two, depending on how hard you use it. But the newer alloy models have much better feedback systems--the technology really has improved just in the last few years."

"I don't think we have the money for that, but thanks for taking a look," Yang said.

Qrow frowned. "What the hell else are we going to spend it on?"

"Something might come up," she insisted, and he was suddenly aware this was too much of a family argument to be having in front of a stranger, no matter how friendly.

Pietro seemed to get the same message, and leaned back in his hair with a rueful expression. "I apologize, my dear. Cross an old scientist with a slow work week, and you get a meddling chatterbox." Yang flashed him a half-smile, strained but grateful.

"Okay, we'll work on her about the arm," said Ruby, reigning queen of externalizing her inside voice. "But, important question: Can I take your dog home and be best friends with him forever and ever?" Zwei lolled his tongue out, vote unclear.

"No," said Qrow.

On the way home, he tapped out a quick message to Tinman: _Pietro's a trip_ . The reply came immediately: _He's the best._

Qrow blew out a breath to push his bangs out of his face. Nobody was nice for no reason. He wasn't going to set Weiss on it yet, but it was worth running a few searches himself.

* * *

Ruby and Penny were meeting up tonight in an Amity garden cafe themed around some show that Penny liked and Ruby had only seen a bit of. Slightly too weird for her, too many friendship-eating flowers and not enough fighting. Penny was seated cross-legged on a turtle paddling serenely across an aquamarine pond, and Ruby touched down lightly across from her to sit. "How's it going?"

"I am stuck," Penny frowned, looking down at a shallow bowl in front of her where tumbled gemstones sat in careful arrangement. She shook the bowl, casting them all into disarray, before looking up at Ruby. "Do you like inverse problems?"

"Uh, not sure what that is, but try me." Ruby reached out to a passing lilypad to catch up a flower-cup of nectar, shaded electric blue to yellow. She wasn't sure it was safe to drink, but she could appreciate the cosmetics in the program.

Penny sat up straight, folding her hands neatly in her lap. "An inverse problem is one where you can see some or all of the outputs of a system, and you must determine the inputs."

"Like that match last week, where the other team was in the bunker but we couldn't tell how many, so we were guessing based on the angle of the shots and the types of ammo they had fired?" Not their best overall score, but it had been fun.

Penny blinked, then smiled. "Yes, exactly. That is an inverse problem. Sometimes they involve fighting, and sometimes they are... slower."

"You have a homework assignment for school or something?" Though the memories were admittedly getting dim at this point, Ruby recalled that school was a thing, wherein they gave you homework.

"Not quite." Penny leaned over to say something to the turtle, and it altered course, taking them in the direction of a waterfall with rainbow-colored mist rising over it. "I am playing a kind of strategy game. All of the players have different resources and partial information about each other. I have allies, but the players can spy on each other. So it is possible that any person I contact is watched, and that what I say to them, or their reaction to those messages, will reveal important information to the opponents. But I do not know for certain who is watched, or how closely. So--an inverse problem."

Ruby reached toward the bowl of tumbled stones that Penny had been sorting, stirring them around with her finger. "Sounds like you could chase in circles for a while, trying to figure it out."

"Indefinitely," Penny agreed with some dissatisfaction. She frowned down at the bowl for a minute, then her expression cleared. She reached down with both hands to scoop up the stones and poured them into Ruby's hands. "But here you are, and you asked. So what would you do?"

"Oh. Uh. I don't know." But now her hands were full of little glimmers of amber and quartz and hematite, and somehow it was hard to totally punt when Penny asked you a question that way. "Lazy answer, I'd ask my friend who's good at those games. I mean, that strategy stuff where it's all but-did-you-know-that-I-knew-that-you-knew, she _camps_ on things like that."

She rocked back a little bit, lifting her hands to peer through the stones at the sun above them. It was actually a double star, she realized, one brilliant diamond mote clinging close to the side of a more gentle yellow orb. "But if it was just me? Well, like that match last week. When I'm in a fight and everyone's stuck trying to guess what's behind the opposite wall, sometimes I do something crazy to break the deadlock. People tell me it's a bad idea, but it keeps working, sooo..."

She shrugged and opened her hands over the bowl, spilling all the stones at once. They bounced against each other, some of them flying out to splash in the pond, the rest staying in a new configuration.

Penny looked at Ruby, smiling a little. "Spectacular. Thank you, this has been helpful."

Their semi-mobile island was drifting close to the waterfall, and silver flashes of birds circled high overhead. Penny reached out a hand to Ruby. "Shall we go to the design shop? I have a weapon idea, and I would like you to tell me what is wrong with it."

"Aww, yeah. Let's go." They blinked out of the virtual space, just before the turtle they had been sitting on paddled serenely over the cliff.

* * *

She was cleaning up the experiment in the apartment, she was sorting assays, she was mapping the list of censored news topics that had been growing incrementally larger.

Penny was in the small quiet room that only she knew about, and two things had changed.

The first thing: On the windowsill there was a small clay pot, filled with rich dark earth. Around it was painted a little heart, in shimmering copper that caught the sunlight. Now, there was a little jade turtle sitting beside it that she did not remember seeing before, and on its back was balanced a reddish-brown seed.

She was very curious what would grow if she planted it, but she knew--without quite remembering the source of her certainty--that it would change things. It was important to wait until the time was right, and she hoped that moment would be clear to her.

The second thing: On the table there was an orrery, and the moon was slightly out of alignment. She could remember all the previous times she had checked, and it had never veered from its path before. She nudged it back into place, but even though it did not wobble again, the disquiet remained.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Coming up next: What's happening in Atlas, and Qrow learns one of Ironwood's better secrets.


	6. Atlas problems

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Qrow yells at Yang a bit, and Ironwood and Winter join forces to dislike people. Several questions are raised about Pietro.

Not long after they got back to the apartment, Qrow headed for the roof. He found Yang against the chimney and settled down next to her. "Want to tell me what that was about?"

"What what was about?" She twirled a spent cartridge in her right hand, almost fumbled it, and curled her fist tight.

Qrow snorted. "You shut down the arm thing with Pietro like it was the dumbest idea ever, and I want to know why."

Yang rolled her eyes. "Calm down. We've just gotta keep an eye on how much money we spend, and there's no point in letting some tech guy think that we've got deep pockets."

He narrowed his eyes. "Okay, you've been looking at the money, you tell me. If your arm is breaking down, when are we going to replace it? You know the deal--there's your personal account, but we tap group money for stuff that's important."

Yang sat forward and wrapped her arms around her knees, avoiding his look. "Not yet. Besides, hitting the group account means asking everyone else to bet that they won't need it. And Weiss has bills, Ruby is probably online right now buying half a gun store, Blake has... actually, I don't know what she spends her money on."

"Tattoos, I think."

"Really?" Yang was momentarily diverted, then shook it off. "Point being, it's not as simple as just deciding to blow the money. We don't exactly have a big cushion if something unexpected comes up."

He watched her, his arms folded, head tilted to one side. "Nice story. And trust me, I'm not mad that you're paying attention to the books and thinking about it. All that said... what's this really about?" He frowned as a thought occurred to him. "I mean, unless you don't want it. Not trying to be some kind of two-arm supremacist here."

Yang scowled and held up her hand, using it to cup the city lights that the air pollution turned into misty jewels. "It's stupid."

Qrow waited.

"Every time I get a new arm, something bad happens."

"Huh?" At her glare, he winced. "What I meant to say was... huh?"

She flipped him off, but halfheartedly, and settled back against the chimney. "I remember when I lost the arm, you were around. Awesome Uncle Qrow, there enough to be cool, not there enough to realize how annoying he was." They exchanged sidelong smirks. "But then after a while with the crappy prosthetic, I got this great new one, with the neural feedback and everything. And... you and Dad had a big fight, and you left."

Qrow sighed noiselessly, letting his head fall back. "Yeah. Noticed the timing on that, huh?"

"'Cause I wasn't a fucking idiot, yeah, I did. What happened?"

He rubbed a hand over the back of his neck, feeling the ripple of the scar. "He wasn't happy about where I got the money. It wasn't your fault."

She half-smiled, no joy in it. "Still, you left. If I'd had to pick one, I'd've rather had you around than the shiny new arm." He looked away, finding something interesting to stare at across the street.

She kept going after a pause, quieter now. "When I outgrew it, and got the new one, that was fine. And then right after that, we found out about Dad."

"Not your fault either." Qrow's voice was low. "Nobody's fault. Except maybe Tai's, because the colossal prick didn't tell anybody he was sick until it was too late to do anything."

Yang blinked down at her hands, matching the fingertips together, tapping them in sequence like she had done in a thousand calibration drills. "It sure feels like my fault sometimes."

Qrow looped an arm around her shoulders, pulling them closer to lean against each other. "Don't do that. You're not responsible for anyone else's choices--not mine, not your dad's, nobody. You are not doing anything wrong, and never have been, by existing and wanting to be able to thrash people wrestling with either arm."

Yang's mouth quirked up for a second, then she turned her face against Qrow's shoulder. He felt a spatter of warmth against his neck, but didn't comment on it. "We're never going to know exactly what Tai was thinking or what choices he made. But he wouldn't want you to be hurting every time you punch somebody. I mean, maybe he would suggest a little _less_ punching, but not because of the arm." He slid his hand down her upper arm to the join, touched very lightly. "So think about what you want to do, and if you're interested, put it to the team. I'm pretty sure they'll say to take the money and do it, but you don't have to take my word for it."

She sniffled, very quietly, which Qrow pretended he didn't hear. "I'll think about it," she said, still muffled against his coat.

"That's all I'm saying. Goddamn, if you kids listened to me the first time, it would save so much talking." He rested his cheek against the top of her head and they stayed like that for a while, watching lights pass by overhead.

* * *

If there was a hell, it might look like a division heads meeting that never ended. Ninety-seven percent posturing and padding, three percent knives-out roller derby where all the deals were made. In a fit of spite after one of them, Ironwood had programmed the minder to guess when important business was happening, based solely on the angle of Jacques Schnee's eyelids. It was depressingly accurate.

Right now, Carmilla was winding up on the Vale Plaza dedication. Still moving smoothly, still set for three weeks away, still ready to climax the holiday shopping season in a blaze of joint Mantle-Atlas goodfeels. "However," she said, "there continue to be rumors that the celebration will be a terrorist target. I'd like to hear from security about that."

An update scrolled into the lower edge of his vision: _I'll bet she would. She gutted the entire plan that I sent her for keeping the arrangements confidential._ Winter, watching through his feed. She had the clearance to be there in person, but she preferred to elevate Jacques' blood pressure strategically, rather than indiscriminately.

"Of course," he said. "There's a lot of net traffic to sift about the event. Filtering for serious threats, nothing above the threshold for high alert. But it's marginal, and I don't like it. It would be safest to delay." That was the short version of an argument he and Winter had tossed back and forth for an hour, trying to put it in terms that would scan to the division heads. Minor gang activity was up across the board. None of the models would converge, and there was so much noise in the data that... well, if Ironwood had been trying to fool his own computers, it's a tactic he might have chosen.

Carmilla looked less than satisfied. (Undisclosed financial ties, the minder supplied, with several event sponsors.) "That would be an enormous waste if it was all for nothing. Out of the question."

It was the expected answer, but he had to try. "At the very least, security needs to be high. Mobilize as if there's going to be an attack, so that if it materializes, the resources will be on-scene immediately. "

Hazel leaned forward, taking up the thread and casually giving the impression that he was blotting out the sunlight from the windows behind him. (The minder: division-wide increase in violent incidents with Mantle civilians; likely psychological issues stemming from sister's death.) "That's easy to do, up to a point. The new Knights don't cause much civilian stress as long as they aren't moving in force, and a certain number of Paladins on display will be expected. Having several Mantas in the air is a good idea anyway, and they can drop a lot of metal in a hurry if needed. We're covered for everything short of a major terrorist attack combined with a Grimm invasion."

"It's a party, Rainart. People are _happy_ at those." Watts, and if Ironwood wasn't already paying attention, the minder would've nudged him that Jacques' eyelids just twitched. "However. The Grimm defenses of Mantle are growing steadily more threadbare, and we'll all wait until the sun goes cold if we expect Mantle civic to fix it. Which is why it's time to consider bringing another Pillar online."

"Absolutely not," Ironwood said immediately. "Categorically, and specifically right before a large public event."

Watts rolled his eyes. "Yes, James, we're all aware of your... slightly inconsistent?... stance in this area. But this is about the long-term safety of Atlas. And you've yet to suggest a viable alternative."

"The Pillars aren't the answer. Even if you somehow ignore the ethical issues, and I can't imagine why you would, there's the emergent behavior. You're still searching for one non-ideal scenario where they consistently engage in prosocial reasoning. Or has that changed?"

Watts was drawing breath to answer when a soft chime sounded, and Jacques smiled his perfect businessman's smile. "Ladies, gentlemen. Thank you so much for your input. Until next week."

Class dismissed. Jacques would avoid giving a final decision until the last moment, playing them off against each other. It was impossible with him to tell where the strategy ended and the power trip began, but underneath it was all about money. And that meant Vale Plaza would go ahead, unless Ironwood could find proof to stop it.

*

Ironwood was back in his office, restlessly checking displays through the windows as Winter came in. "Go ahead," he said, hearing the slight bite in his tone and taking a slow breath.

She raised a brow, but took a seat and a moment to marshal her thoughts. He was pretty sure that was just for appearances; he wasn't sure he'd ever seen her at a loss for words. "It's not clear to me why you're so set against the Pillars."

They'd had this argument before. Much as he might think she _should_ understand, he believed that she sincerely did not. "I think it's the psychic equivalent of opening a new credit card to pay off the balance on the last one." _That_ was getting close to things she wasn't cleared to hear. "And every time Arthur is pressed about the personality schisms, he evades. He's hiding something, and it's a large enough secret to be fatal to Atlas if it's as bad as it could be."

Winter frowned. "It's a complicated program. _They're_ complicated programs. That he can't predict the future is not, by itself, enough reason to shut it down. And Atlas is still lacking equivalent defenses against the Grimm that can cover the whole arcology. In the long run, it may be as bad as you say. But in the short run... is it really acceptable to shut them down, knowing that people will die?"

Which brought them back to the same point they always reached in this conversation. He disagreed with her assessment, but the objection wasn't trivial, and he never wanted to bludgeon a subordinate for honestly answering a question. He reached for coffee, but stopped just before it reached his mouth to grimace at the sludge that coated the bottom of the cup. Setting it down again, he sighed. "If I thought Jacques listened to my objections as much as you do, I'd sleep easier. What else?"

She looked away, settling her eyes on a piece of art on the wall. He saw a muscle work in her throat as she swallowed. Then she met his eyes again, square. "This morning, Steele talked to me about the deputy post in psyops."

He leaned back, gesturing for her to go on.

She sat up a little straighter--he would swear she never slouched, but somehow she always seemed capable of an extra bit of stiffening. "He says I'd report directly to him, full autonomy over basic operations, conditional over R&D pending a successful trial period."

Ironwood blew out a breath. "Hell of an offer."

Her brows drew down. "You don't like it."

He shook his head. "Whether I like it or not is irrelevant. What do you think?"

Her lips pressed together and she looked away again; a person who wasn't Winter probably would have fidgeted. "I think it's an amazing chance, but I don't trust it. I have... opinions... about how psyops is run, and enough of an ego to think I could do good there. But I don't know whether he's offering it to curry favor with my father, or worse, as part of some play _against_ my father. It's like a giant rattlesnake, made of chocolate, under a golden cage propped up by a stick with a sign saying 'free money here!' Ridiculous."

He half-smiled, headache receding for a moment. "And every time Steele talks, you can see Arthur's lips move."

"Your words," she said primly, and his smile widened before vanishing into a steady look.

"I can't advise you on this. Not just because of my obvious conflict of interest: I'd hate to lose you, but I desperately need an ally that highly placed in psyops. But ignoring all that, it's your call. You're ambitious, you're talented, you have the work ethic of some sort of demonic accountant. You absolutely deserve better than to hold your current job, waiting for me to die so you can get a promotion."

Winter, whose cheeks had flushed slightly at the first part, looked faintly scandalized at the end.

He waved his hand at the half-formed objection and finished. "I expect you to leave sooner or later, and better that than watch you stifle yourself here. I don't know if this is the right move, and certainly, it's a dark closet full of knives. I trust your integrity. But I also know that the system changes you more than you change it." She met his eyes, and for a second they shared a look full of all the things he couldn't say, the compromises made and the secrets buried in unmarked graves. Winter looked away first.

He finished quietly, "I can't advise you on this, but I'll respect whatever choice you make."

Her jaw was tight, and she nodded. In some tired corner of his brain, he wondered how much farther she'd have surpassed him by now if her father had given her a shred of encouragement. He banished the thought and started a new set of queries running: budget projections for psyops, whether they'd had any recent shortfalls that could be gleaned from the accounting, whether they were setting her up to take the fall for some mistake already made. That much, at least, he could give her.

"Well." Back on perfect composure, Winter nodded toward the main screen on the wall and started the feed. "After Carmilla's comments, I wanted to check the modeling on different attack scenarios. No disturbance is still the most probable outcome, but there's some higher-order interaction terms that might be worth worrying about."

The graphs and summary blocks started rolling, and Ironwood settled back to go through the numbers again. Along the way, he forgot what he was doing long enough to drink the coffee sludge. That was another one for Penny's scorecard.

* * *

When you met in Amity, there was no reason the place had to look like a seedy dive--no reason except that Qrow felt like being in his element. He and Tinman had already hashed out most of the details of the next job, which was definitely illegal but surprisingly harmless. "Just to be clear, you don't actually want any of the databases. You just want to know how hard it was to get to them."

"In detail, and without tipping them off that you were there, yes. If you have something else to do with the information, that's your lookout, but it can't lead back to the intrusions." The ambiance for this particular meeting spot included a pool table in the corner and screens over the bar playing a few games. By now, Qrow had pegged Tinman as management, and was mildly surprised that he didn't seem more out of place.

Time to poke a little harder and see if anything rattled. "I did some digging on Pietro, since you talked him up so much. Doctorate, engineering and medical certifications I can't even spell, used to run a big lab up in Atlas. Then about five years ago all of that vanished. There's not much about why--rumors about experiments gone wrong, ethical violations, vague but juicy-sounding stuff. And it turns out he's not listed on any of those nice registries anymore."

Tinman had stiffened up a bit, he thought. It was hard to tell--the guy _really_ needed to relax--but Qrow was starting to get a sense of the baseline.

Still, his voice was even. "Was that a question?"

"Just curious, since you seem to be buddies with the guy." Such great, close friends that he hadn't bothered to tell him a package was coming. "You going to convince me that it's all a big misunderstanding?"

Tinman shook his head. "I'm not going to convince you of anything. You've met him; if you want to work with him, you're capable of making up your own mind."

Qrow smirked. "Anyone ever tell you that nobody likes a cryptic asshole?"

Tinman laughed. "Constantly."

It was the most human sound he'd heard from the avatar, and Qrow grinned in spite of himself. "Well, if I--oh _come on_." He sat up straight, glaring at the screen he could see over Tinman's shoulder.

"What?" Tinman whipped around, good reflexes. After a couple of seconds, his attention settled on the screens and his shoulders relaxed. "Haven and Mountain Glenn? Don't tell me that tragedy is still playing out."

"This season could have been a comeback for the Glenn," grumbled Qrow. "They finally patched the holes in their defense, and Haven had drama with their co-captains and wait, are you _following_ this?" Because Tinman was still half turned around, watching. Qrow tapped the interface, and the scenery rearranged itself to shift the screen closer and larger.

"I don't have the time anymore. I'm sure I don't even know half of the players now." But still watching, and wincing slightly as two figures got into a brief melee skirmish and lost control of the ball. "Is that the latest Arc? Whole family's got impulse control problems." He finally seemed to notice he'd been distracted, and looked back to Qrow. "So, ah, about the job..."

Now he was all corporate mystery man again? This was _hilarious_. Qrow kicked back, grinning wide. "Oh no, all my questions are answered. The screen stays--gods know I always get outvoted for what to watch at home. Now if you need to go do important business, scamper along. But if you want to hang around, there's still a whole second half for you to catch up on what you missed."

Tinman actually sighed. "Anyone ever tell you that nobody likes a manipulative prick?"

Qrow hummed. "Constantly. Now buckle up, Mountain Glenn's about to attack and it's going to be _messy_."

* * *

A day later. When Ironwood woke (three hours and forty-four minutes, at least he wasn't losing ground), it was too early for even him to face the prospect of work. Sitting on the couch with a mug of tea, it occurred to him that the center of the apartment was abnormally clear of artistic or scientific detritus. "Penny, you were going to tell me about your latest experiment."

"Which one?" She, of course, was always perfectly awake.

"Mm. Something with the skylight."

"Oh! That was finished three weeks ago."

Had it been that long? He realized it had, and felt a stab of guilt. "I'm sorry that I forgot. What was it about?"

"I had been thinking about light in art--photography and painting. I was curious about whether there was a quality to natural light that I couldn't replicate artificially, as some of the commentaries argue."

"And?"

"I think... yes. It is hard to describe in words, and uninteresting to describe in numbers. But there was a difference in _feel_. It suggests that I cannot see things now exactly the way that I used to, and that interests me."

He wanted to veer away from the topic, but squashed the urge. She had brought it up. "Do you miss having eyes?" Green, wide, active, laughing. He had photographs, but they missed something essential in memory.

"Not exactly. I would not mind _having_ them again, but more as an extra than a replacement. Maybe if I could have several sets at once..." She trailed off musingly, then her voice came back quieter. "The helper that Father made for me broke."

Pietro. It took a moment to make the switch--they didn't often bring him up. "That's why you haven't been moving things around as much."

"Yes. There are other mechanical options, but they are are less useful. Do you think... could he come back to fix it?"

Every time she sounded wistful, it twisted his gut, because it always seemed to be for something that he couldn't give her. "I don't think that's likely."

"I see." And, after a moment, "I miss him."

 _Me too._ "It's not the same, but in the lab they could probably fix the bot."

"Maybe." He didn't know if they had mediocre machining skills or if she was just holding them to an impossible standard, but either way, Penny had made her opinion clear in the past. "I would rather not take it to them. It was a gift, and it feels strange to have it disassembled in a place where he is no longer welcome."

He certainly could understand that. "Do you want to work on it here? I don't have Pietro's wizardry, but we could take a look together."

"Yes. That would be excellent."

"All right." As the conversation shuffled out of that minor minefield, he remembered something that had almost slipped away. "It's not the same as having Pietro visit, but I was hoping to introduce you to someone new. I asked Winter Schnee to come over for dinner this week--pending your approval, of course."

"I met her once when she came by the lab. I am not sure that she likes me."

"Winter doesn't like anyone when she meets them for the first time." Admittedly, often not the second through tenth. "And if she makes you uncomfortable, she's out."

"Then with that stipulation, of course. Find out what she wants to eat, and I will tell you how to cook it."

"Deal," he said, and got up to look for his tools.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Coming up next: Things fall apart.


	7. Ghost town

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Beacon has a criminal school board meeting. Blake has an idea and needs a hug. The third mission does not go as planned.

Pietro was hunched over the work bench, eyeing a zoomed-in schematic on his scroll, when it was replaced with an incoming call. Instead of a name or number, there was only a string of symbols--a star, something that looked like set theory notation, and... a turtle? He blinked and accepted it. "Yes?"

"Salutations, father," came a warm and familiar voice. "We have many things to discuss."

* * *

The desks had been pushed together in one of the Beacon classrooms to make a conference table. Glynda occupied one end, the scroll in front of her projecting up several diagrams into midair. Oz had the other end, and you couldn't pay Qrow enough to vote on which of them was actually in charge. In the middle was Leonardo, looking worried, and a woman with light brown skin and fair hair that Qrow didn't recognize. She gave Qrow a flatly skeptical look when he slouched in, jacket slung over his shoulders like a cape.

"What'd I miss?" he asked Glynda, settling into a chair.

"Introductions, for one. This is Robyn Hill. She's done a lot of grassroots work in Mantle, organizing shelters and posting Grimm watches."

"An overachiever. You two must get along great." He tipped a couple of fingers at Robyn, who continued to look unimpressed.

"And this," Glynda continued in a tone of heavier patience, "is Qrow. He's here because he and his team are probably the best Grimm hunters on the board right now."

"Ooh, say that again," Qrow grinned. "That looked like it hurt."

"As I was saying. We're catching up everyone on the local gang problem. The attack on Tukson's Book Trade turned out to be one of several recently, all of them just outside Beacon's influence."

That was bad, but in a weird way. "Wouldn't have pegged Beacon for a gang target--it's kind of shitting where you eat to take out the largest concentration of Grimm hunters in the area."

Glynda frowned. "I've stopped being surprised when people do foolish things. But I agree, it's odd. Leonardo is checking for similar incidents around Haven. But if it is pointed at us, I have to look at retaliating."

Ozpin stirred. "With winter arriving, this may not be the best time to defend your territory too aggressively."

Glynda looked at him evenly. "That's the thing about territory--if you don't defend it, you don't really have it."

"If you're going to go after the Fangs," said Qrow, "better check your targets. They've had infighting for a while, and now it's turning into a full-blown split. Tigrins on the east side, Taurins to the south. Tukson's was more or less on the border. If you hit the wrong group, you could end up with both of them after you."

"Escalating a gang war now will bring Grimm in numbers we can't handle," insisted Ozpin.

Qrow shrugged. "Hey, you didn't like my idea."

"Your idea was a war crime," Leonardo said.

"There'd have to be a war first," said Robyn, eyes narrowed as she tracked the back-and-forth. "What was the idea?"

Qrow spread his hands. "The Grimm aren't a problem until they're an Atlas problem. So target the Atlas security screens and keep at them, until they can't keep out the Grimm any more reliably than Mantle can. If you really want to ramp things up, hook up some tunnels to burrow access right under the arcology."

She looked at him with a blend of admiration and revulsion. "I'm starting to see what they meant about you."

Qrow hadn't gotten this far by walking into lines like that, so he shut up while the others tried to read the entrails of this new problem. It still didn't quite fit to him--Beacon and the other Hunter centers were usually an unofficial clear zone from gang scuffles, because nobody benefited from a rise in Grimm. And if scuffles turned into a wider conflict, the Mantle-Atlas joint security agreements would come down on everyone like a rain of lead. You could look at Menagerie if you needed a reminder of how _that_ would go.

In the end, they settled on a strategy of defense and scouting: use Hunters to run more area patrols, both to boost Beacon's street presence and to hear more gossip from the locals about potential trouble. Run some targeted snooping on the gangs, to see if this was just the usual discontents or the start of something big.

"Emerald and Mercury have done all right," Glynda said to Leonardo, not quite grudgingly. "I'll see if they want in on the patrol missions."

"They did good work at Haven," he agreed. "A bit raw, but so it goes. I swear they get younger every year." Everyone nodded resigned agreement at that, but Leonardo looked over at Qrow. "To investigate the Fangs, we're going to need help from the Faunus. There's one on your team, isn't there?"

Something about the question set Qrow's teeth on edge, but he tried not to show it as he hitched a shoulder. "I can see if she's interested, but it's up to her."

"Of course." For such a big guy, Leonardo backed off quickly.

A few minutes later, the meeting had dispersed. Robyn lingered, looking at Qrow.

"Something to say?" He wasn't trying to pick a fight, but sometimes it just... came out that way.

"Did you mean what you said earlier, about the Grimm?" Her expression was hard to read.

She scanned as the blunt type; he figured what the hell, and answered honestly. "That we should do _that?_ No, that'd be horrible. That we're fucked until and unless the Grimm become an Atlas problem? Absolutely. Trouble is, Atlas won't care until they're knocking on the front door. And by that point they'll have gnawed Mantle to pieces. All of this," he twirled a finger to indicate the departed council, "is just rearranging the dirt next to an open grave."

Her face was hard--not mean, but determined. "We'll find a path forward. Though I don't know if it'll be peaceful enough for Ozpin."

Suddenly ready to be done, Qrow stood. "Don't kid yourself; Oz is the worst person in this room. Nobody has a redemption hard-on that big without a reason for it." Not much to say after that, so they left.

* * *

_AngryBird: You watching the game?_

_Tinman: Some of us are busy in the evening._

_AngryBird: Sure, brag about your work ethic to the career criminal, that's a power move._

_Tinman: ..._

_Tinman: I didn't say I was working._

_AngryBird: You could lie, I guess._

_AngryBird: Seriously, that last play, it was like watching five drunk cats fighting over the last piece of fish._

_Tinman: Are you going to annoy me until I turn it on?_

_AngryBird: You can put down the scroll anytime you want._

_AngryBird: I'm sure your work is VERY exciting._

_Tinman: For the love of--_

_Tinman: I need to finish this report. See if good thoughts can hold them together and I'll turn it on at halftime._

_AngryBird: I'll be waiting._

* * *

"You want to go back to Tukson's?" Ruby blinked up at Blake.

She nodded. "Not the shop, but the building. There's something bothering me, and if I'm right, we may need to leave in a hurry."

Ruby shrugged, and that was that. A bit later they were both hunkered down by the torn-up fan vents on the roof. Almost three weeks after the incident, it didn't even have a strip of caution tape to pretend that a fix was on the way.

"This was blocking off the top of the shaft, but there was a whole flock of Grimm in there." Blake held her hands out, a vulture's wingspan. "I don't see another opening up here, so... where did they come in?" And how long had they been there, nesting in the walls, feasting off Tukson's misery and whatever else happened in that building?

"Eegh." Ruby made an appreciative grimace. "Welp, let's go get nosy."

They went down with weapons out, but the flock was gone. At the bottom, a metal grate separated the ground floor from the basement, but several panels had been removed to leave a wide hole. Ruby took out a light and they descended, threading their way through boilers, an incinerator, empty boxes, decrepit furniture.

They paused when the beam of Ruby's flashlight played over a ragged hole in the concrete, darkness behind it. "That... probably doesn't go to the magical mushroom kingdom."

Blake made an agreeing noise, already going over to check. The hole opened on a tunnel that went out of light range in either direction. The air didn't smell especially fresh, but it was moving slightly, and not as cold as Blake expected. "City heating tunnels. Let's go." She popped a glow stick and stuck it in a crack beside the opening.

Ruby followed, Crescent Rose braced on one shoulder so she could aim the light. They picked a direction and started off, footsteps swallowed by the creak of pipes and the noise that filtered down from the street.

"So Yang said you were pretty bummed about the Tukson's thing," Ruby offered after a minute.

Blake gave her a quick sidelong glance. "What did she say?"

Ruby shrugged. "Just that, and that maybe I should give you a hug sometime if I could do it without making it weird."

Blake snorted softly in spite of herself, able to picture the conversation exactly. "You two are weird." But it was nice, somehow, that Yang was looking out for her without spreading her business all over the place.

"I think you mean awesome. So...?"

It took Blake a second. "The hug? Not right now. But thanks."

After a while and a few junctions, each one marked by another glowstick, the whole thing was starting to feel futile. Ruby must be thinking the same thing, because she said, "How long do you wanna look?"

"Yeah. Maybe it's a waste. Although..." Something that had been nagging at her finally fitted together, and she looked around. "What have you seen down here?"

"Um. Pipes, concrete, trash, sketchy stains on the floor... no mushroom kingdom, called that one."

"No street people. No blankets, no recent food wrappers--this time of year, in a tunnel where the heat is still running, there should be people." She could _feel_ Ruby's eyes on her back, but for a wonder, she didn't ask.

Instead she yawned. "So they're somewhere else. Can we sit down? I'm tired."

That was... weird timing, and yet somehow Blake agreed. It was exhausting. They plopped down immediately, not even searching for a spot with good sight lines, and Blake dropped Gambol Shroud as if it weighed fifty times more. With her legs tucked up to her chest and the hiss of traffic overhead, she found her mind sliding back to worse times, the nausea of hunger and the need to sleep with one eye open. Had she really come far since then? You could get better clothes and a clean place to sleep, but that wouldn't fix what was rotten inside.

"Hey," Ruby said indistinctly. "Is that... red?"

Blake looked, and saw the points of crimson light, bobbing gently in a slow rhythm down the tunnel. "Mm."

"Should we... leave? Or fight. Or something."

Blake watched dully, wondering if her self-pity had summoned them. That would be about right. Just about...

The flashlight flickered, startling her. Clarity returned for a breath. What were they _doing_ , sitting on their butts and watching Grimm get closer? She fumbled up her weapon, which still seemed so heavy. "Ruby." She nudged her harder. " _Ruby._ "

"Ugh."

Trying to hold on to her last ounce of concentration even as it thinned away, Blake took sloppy aim at one of the lights. _It doesn't matter if you hit, DO IT._ She fired, and Ruby jerked to one side, squawking at the crack of sound.

"Oh shit. Oh _shit!_ " Suddenly alert again, the shorter woman wobbled to her feet, bracing Crescent Rose and sighting down the tunnel where the glowing points were multiplying. She fired and it was thunderously loud; one of the Grimm tore apart, but the one next to it let out a shriek. The noise seemed to go on and on, bouncing off of every curve inside Blake's skull, growing until it crushed every other feeling under a sense of futility.

"Hey." She stumbled forward as the Grimm surged, tugging at Ruby's arm. The scythe was already drooping, too heavy to hold up. "We need to go. Now."

"In a minute," Ruby said tiredly. They didn't have a minute; they had seconds.

Trying to sift through the river of mud and shit in her mind to find something real, Blake jerked at her arm harder. "Ruby, I want that fucking hug and I want it _right now_ so get us out of here."

It penetrated enough for Ruby's eyes to widen, and she swung the scythe back over her shoulder, turned, and half-tackled Blake. Then the air was streaming past them, petals battering Blake's face, and she clung to the other Huntress as they barreled back through the tunnels. The long passages whipped by and there was the last glow, and then they were out, bursting out through the roof from the building that Blake was never ever going to enter again.

They were out... but even as the last echoes of that awful scream died away, Blake felt like it was still rattling around inside, shaking loose all the wasted years and the oily shame and the drowning need to forget. They were out, but for some reason she was crying and still hanging on to Ruby. Ruby, who shifted her arms around Blake to hug her more securely, murmuring things about how it was going to be okay that she probably even meant.

* * *

Third job for Tinman.

Earlier that evening, packing up: Weiss with a frown on her face (normal) and a look of hesitation (less normal). "You know that I brought some confidential information with me out of Atlas."

The legendary Weiss dirtfile--Yang and Ruby loved speculating about what must be in it. "Yup," Qrow said.

"Some of it is... well, blackmail material, to be crass. A lot of it isn't actually that useful, because it's encrypted or missing the context. One of the files is just a string of coordinates with nonsense codes. I tracked down a couple and they were minor, so I wrote it off--but I still check our job locations against it, just in case."

"And this one was a hit." No need to make it a question.

She nodded. "Nothing helpful, just the coordinates and the label SP3. But it's definitely a match for the address."

"Huh." Something stirred, way back in a dark corner, but after a second he shrugged. "Your show tonight, so what do you think? We'll scrub if you don't like it."

"That seems like it would be a waste. There's nothing solid to object to, I just wanted to bring it up." She looked a little unsettled at the prospect of it being her decision.

Qrow went back to checking his gear. "Okay, it's brought. If your gut says we go on, then we go. But let's put all the icing on not getting caught, huh? Treat this like we're breaking into some sketchy motherfuckers' place to rifle through their dirty laundry."

Now, at the site.

The server room was on the second floor; they had gotten Weiss in, now she was doing her reanimator act with the darkened racks of CPUs and the spare power supplies they had brought. Keep it off the grid, pretend that somebody was watching even if most likely nobody was.

With her ensconced in her cave, Blake and Qrow split up to case the rest of the place. Blake had been off, subdued for the last couple of days since she and Ruby found those Grimm in the tunnels. Qrow couldn't tell if it was over the line of being his business to ask about. That whole zone was still fuzzy with Blake; she'd been with them for less than a year and she mostly preferred to sort her own shit out. So when she said it was fine, he shrugged and said okay. Now she was checking in occasionally from the grounds, prowling out to the property line before she looped back to start down from the roof.

Qrow went through the lower interior room by room, and it was on the second sweep through the ground floor that he found it. A hallway ended in what seemed like a normal way, except that on his second pass he knew that the cabinet there actually belonged in a different room two hallways over. He looked at it for a second, wishing he had Glynda's Semblance, then sighed and started emptying it to move.

A few minutes later, he wasn't sure whether or not he was glad. "Staircase, northeast corner," he said over the comms.

"Not on the plans," Blake said several seconds later.

"'Swhat I thought. Keep doing your thing, I'll check it out." Behind the door, the stairs only went down. He paused at the top, eyes running over the walls. The rest of the building was bland concrete and prefab in a beige suit. Here, they hadn't bothered with the paint. In his gut, a little knot of unease was gathering. He rolled his shoulders and closed his eyes, reached past his Semblance to the other place.

He had told Clover once that he thought of it like flying. Stretch out, a sense of leaping, and suddenly you were on a slightly different plane. Everything spread out below you, no one could see you because they didn't look up. He opened his eyes and the world didn't look any different, but he knew: no cameras, no sensors, no electronic eyes below were capable of seeing him now. Harbinger resting on his shoulder, he descended the stairs.

One flight down, heavy fire door at the bottom stuck half open. There was water damage on the walls, dried echoes of it on the floor, a musty metallic scent that clung to the inside of his nostrils. He checked with the snake camera before he turned sideways to eel through the half-open door. No need to be a cocky asshole, just because you thought you were covered. That was how the luck got in.

The basement was a coil of hallways and locked rooms. The quiet, which had been ignorable upstairs, sat oppressive on his shoulders now. The smell had gotten a bit worse. He started through systematically. Two storerooms, emptied of everything but some mildewed cartons. Bathroom, nothing. Couple of offices, shelves and desks bare, nothing.

He levered open one of the doors to the big room in the middle, and the world shivered and resettled. Slab floor, drain in the center. Waist-height bench along the walls, mostly empty now. Just a few stray pieces of glassware, a couple of marks where some larger piece of equipment had sat and left a shadow. Everything worth saving was gone, only the cheap stuff remained: bleach marks on the floor, discarded surgical implements, operating table in the center.

He had never been here, but he knew this room. "--row? Are you there?" He blinked and he wasn't sure how long he had been standing there, pulse up, fingers cold.

"Yeah." His voice was a croak in his ears.

"Is everything all right? I should be done soon." Weiss.

He was here with people. They needed an answer, or they were going to come down the stairs too. "Fine. I'll keep looking." He leaned against the door, blinking, trying to tell if it was his eyes that were blurry or something in the air.

 _Keep it together._ He sucked in a breath, tried to find clarity again. Treat it like hostile territory, in and out with no traces. Two more rooms and a hallway to check.

Another office, stripped down like the last. Worse water damage, the walls weeping streaks of rust and some kind of probably-toxic chemicals making crystallized fern patterns across the muddy floor. A long narrow room with shelves, boxes of latex gloves, more glassware, specimen freezers with the glass doors hanging ajar. Chip on the table, brown stain around it, no way to tell now if it was rust or blood.

He felt like he was trying to breathe underwater. The back of his neck stung, and after a second he realized he was scratching at it. Blake and Weiss were talking on the comms; he barely heard them.

"Nothing on the upper floors," said Blake. "Just offices and conference rooms, cleaned out. Looks like the whole place shut down maybe five years ago. The top couple of floors weren't even totally finished, there's still construction supplies laying around."

"I'm wrapping up here," Weiss answered. "The transfer is set up to run overnight. I'll keep an eye on it for a few more minutes, but right now it's looking fine. The relay is pretty inconspicuous, and it'll wipe itself when it finishes."

He was back in the main room, and couldn't remember going there. One more hallway to check. He opened it and the smell got immediately worse.

Four doors, reinforced glass panel in each of them. First one, empty. Last three, not.

Lost a minute again. He was leaning against the far wall, trying to breathe. Weiss was in his ear, her voice jarringly normal.

"Hey, there's a whole separate circuit, I think it's downstairs cameras."

" _Don't_ \--" but it was too late.

Four seconds of silence, five, then he heard her make a noise. "Is that--oh. Oh no."

"Wrap it up," he said. He barely recognized his own voice.

"What's going on?" said Blake.

He turned, pressed his face against the cold damp wall that smelled of rust and rot. Ground his skin against the grit until the sharp scrape of it burst the bubble around him and he could breathe again. "Nothing worth stealing down here. Pack the van, I'm on my way upstairs."

He looked in the cells one more time before he left. He owed them that.

Upstairs, outside, night air in his lungs but it smelled the same. Blake was looking at him warily, at Weiss who was pale and tight-lipped. "Let's get out of here," she said after a second; Blake was capable of swallowing a lot of questions in a pinch. "Tell me what's going on after."

Qrow was floating, barely anchored to his body. He started the bike, stared at his hands for a minute before he remembered to put on his helmet. "I'll catch up later."

"Qrow," said Weiss, but he was gone, flying.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Coming up next: Possible author slowdown due to a broken arm! I'd been aiming for weekly updates, and much of the next chapter is already drafted, but I'll have to see how it goes.


	8. Missing

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Much ado is made about a missing bird. Meanwhile, life goes on in Atlas.

_AngryBird: You've got a lot of fucking nerve._

_Tinman: I do._

_Tinman: But I don't actually know what we're talking about, here._

_Tinman: Hello?_

* * *

_RedHood: gonna miss tonight sorry_

_Ha'Penny: I will endeavor to uphold your honor. Is everything all right?_

_RedHood: sorta... not?_

_RedHood: its okay_

_RedHood: go wreck em_

_Ha'Penny: Affirmative. If there is anything I can do to help, please tell me._

_RedHood: <3_

* * *

Dinner was running late. Ironwood wasn't a half-bad cook, but it had been so long since there was anyone else to cook for that he'd lost the habit. And now he was trying to get everything just right, Penny wouldn't stop arguing with him about the damn soup, that message from last night was still a mystery... and he completely missed the sound of the door chime, as well as Penny inviting their guest in. 

"Hello?" Winter stood in the kitchen doorway, bearing a bottle of wine. 

Ironwood looked up, spoon in one hand, metal hand pointed accusingly at the kitchen viewscreen, apron still wrapped around his waist. "Ah. Hell."

Winter's eyes were a little wide. She did not laugh. It was possible her mouth twitched. "Can I... help with anything?"

There went his authority in the office. "Thank you," he said, gathering the shreds of his dignity, "but it's fine. Penny, I take it you've introduced yourself?"

"Yes," she said innocently. 

"Wonderful. Winter, if you don't mind, take a seat on the couch for a few minutes? Penny is more than capable of entertaining you and backseat driving in here at the same time."

Winter strategically retreated, Ironwood returned to the battle with renewed focus, and five minutes later they were sitting down to dinner with no mention of the state of the kitchen.

"Try the bowl on the left first," Penny said helpfully, as Ironwood set out the dual soup course. 

He managed not to sigh, though at this point he felt owed. "Last-minute compromise," he explained to Winter. "There's a household difference of opinion on how much pepper goes in this recipe."

"So you... made both," Winter hazarded. She had her game face on, and he genuinely couldn't tell if she was miserable or trying not to laugh. He hoped for the latter.

"Yes," Penny said with some satisfaction. "Father is unwilling to say that his opinion should prevail because he is the one with taste buds. Without pressing that advantage, he cannot win the argument."

Winter quietly choked on her mouthful of soup, but recovered quickly. "A bit ruthless, aren't you?" 

"Only when it comes to soup."

Ironwood sat back as they kept going, and let himself enjoy the food. Penny could be an aggressive conversationalist, but she was in rare form tonight. He thought he'd known, but now saw how little he'd understood, how much it meant to have someone over at their home. He should've done this months ago. 

Dinner finished in good order, and he was able to take the edge off the kitchen cleanup while they argued about strategic commentary from the early Corporate Wars. At some point the topic shifted to higher culture, and Ironwood didn't exactly tune out, but he found his thoughts drawn back to the cryptic message from Qrow. Something had gone wrong. He felt it, but wouldn't know until tomorrow, when they met in Amity for the trade. 

"...prefer the earlier works; they are less polished but they feel more true. Your brother gave an especially compelling performance of the lament."

There was a pin-drop silence, and Ironwood hastily replayed the last few seconds. 

"I apologize," Penny said in a more subdued tone. "I have said a wrong thing." 

Winter's face had gone blank, but she shook her head slightly, then more vigorously. "No. No, it's fine. It's... actually nice to hear someone mention Whitley. He's a verboten topic these days."

"Ah. Is that why they say that he is traveling in Sanus?" 

"Penny," said Ironwood. 

"What do you mean?" said Winter. Hard to read. Not exactly angry, but... firm, and looking directly at Penny's nearest speaker.

There was a pause. "I believe I was being indiscreet. When I was looking up your family, the only information available to me said that Whitley Schnee was traveling. However, there is no media trail consistent with that; he seems to have simply disappeared two years ago." 

Winter's mouth compressed into a line. "I can't comment on that." 

Ironwood looked at her sharply;  _that_ sounded like the echo of a deeply unpleasant conversation with Jacques. 

Winter didn't look at him, and after a moment she drew a breath. "However. I miss him, and I don't mind you bringing him up."

"Thank you," said Penny. "You are being gracious. I am still learning how to do that."

Winter sighed, and the tension left her posture. "Well, you won't get much practice with the lab techs, unless they've started seeing more sunlight and human contact since the last time I was there. But I'd be happy to talk more, if you'd like." She shot an inquiring look to Ironwood.

He managed to avoid leaping at the suggestion, saying only, "You already have the clearance for it. She's classified, but your scroll has the protocols."

"Yes. I am too amazing for the majority of Atlas to handle," Penny said, and if it was a touch brittle, she moved on quickly. "I will message you. But you should tell me when I am being too much, as I may not notice. Also, I never sleep."

"Neither does my boss," Winter said, "so I'm used to it."

They finished not long after, and quiet descended for a moment after the door closed behind their departing guest. Then Penny said, "I like her."

He smiled faintly, feeling bone-tired but like he'd done one thing right today. "Me too." And both she and Winter could use an extra friend. But it would be overbearingly paternal to say it out loud, so instead he noted, "She never did vote on the soup."

"She was being polite. Mine was better."

* * *

_RedHood: I checked every place I could remember, even Smokey's_

_RedHood: nobody's seen him_

_Yangtastic: FUCK_

_Yangtastic: Weiss?_

_WIce: Nothing yet. His scroll is destroyed, or underground, or maybe in the river._

_WIce: He left Harbinger in the van._

_BlackCat: Can you track anything else that he'd have on him?_

_WIce: Hypothetically, if I can snoop any of his other tech, that's turning up blank too._

_WIce: I'll keep looking, but I'm sure it's fine. He does this sometimes._

_Yangtastic: Not in the middle of a job_

_Yangtastic: I'm gonna kill him as soon as we find him_

* * *

It was early afternoon the next day, and Blake was thinking about packing a bag. Not that she planned to leave; it just soothed an itch to know that she could. She was going through the list in her head when Yang came through the main room like a friendly-ish tornado. 

"Hey," she zeroed in on Blake. "Can I borrow you for like two or three hours? I need backup." She didn't actually stop, heading back to the room she shared with Ruby.

Blake had to hop down and follow her to answer. "Sure? I mean, yeah, but what's going on?"

Yang, who had all the body shyness of a crowded locker room, was peeling off her clothes to change. Blake got an eyeful of lats and delts and lost her train of thought. After a moment, she blinked and fixed her eyes a little off to the side, on the wallpaper of family photos and fight posters.

Yang said, "I think I know somebody who can find Qrow. But it's sorta sketchy. And I don't want to be the asshole who goes off alone to look for the other asshole who went off alone." She finished pulling on what Blake recognized as her lucky shirt, and scraped her hair back into a thick ponytail. 

"Of course." What else could Blake say?

"Great." Yang turned, pausing mid-flurry to flick her eyes over Blake's face. "Hey. I know something's up."

"Did Ruby say something?"  _Oh good, way to sound guilty._

Yang's smile lifted the shadow that had clouded her face for the last day and a half. "Nah. I just like you a lot, so I kinda pay attention." Her cheeks went a little pink, and she took a breath. "So I just wanted to say, if you can hang on until we find Uncle Qrow... we can deal with whatever it is, right?"

Blake didn't know what to say to that, but Yang held up her hand, pinkie extended. After a second, Blake hooked her pinkie with hers and nodded. 

That smile flared again, brilliant, before Yang's face shuttered again. "You're the best, Blake. Let's go."

  
  


When they pulled up their bikes next to a scruffy-looking gym, Blake looked around warily. "Just checking, but you know this is Tribal territory, right?"

"Yup. I'm gonna go pick a fight. Hang back unless you need to do crowd control and try not to kill anyone, all right?" Yang didn't look at Blake, focus all forward, rolling her neck. 

"Okay." Blake thought of her go bag again, then shook it off. Time to be here and now. 

Inside, a smattering of people were working--a couple on heavy bags, two sparring in a ring in the center, a few more hanging out along the sidelines watching. Yang pushed the door open hard enough to bang against the wall, and every pair of eyes, none of them friendly, were suddenly on her. 

"Hi," she said, strolling forward. "I need to talk to Raven."

The nearest guy snickered, looking her elaborately up and down. "Who?"

Yang stepped in with a left cross that cracked him hard across the face. He staggered back a step and she followed, seizing his head in her hands and bringing it down sharply just as she brought her knee up. They met with a muffled crack, and he fell in a jumble of limbs.

A couple of people started forward, fists clenched. Yang tilted her head to one side. "Can't take me one-on-one? That's cool, I guess." 

They looked at each other, hesitated, and then one of them stepped ahead. Yang shrugged out of her jacket and went to meet him. 

The next few minutes were busy. Blake stayed in the background, shifting to keep everyone in view. Yang and the other fighter--a stocky boarish Faunus with tattoos twining up his arms--circled for a minute before clashing. He was a bit slower, but powerful, and she hung back to counterpunch. Her opening came when he overcommited on a combination to her head, and when she slipped it, she was able to bring up her elbow to smash into his face. He fell back a step, she followed up with a kick to his thigh, and then Blake had to fade that out so she could quietly come up on the man on the sidelines who was digging in his bag for a weapon. "Hi," she said, tapping Gambol Shroud against his temple. "Don't."

Grunt, thwack, grunt,  _thud_ . Blake looked back to see the Faunus hunch over on his right side--liver shot. She winced. 

Yang added a final punch to demonstrate her sincerity, then pushed him. He hit the side of ring and slid down to take a seat. "I'll fight you all if I need to," said Yang conversationally, though she was breathing a bit harder. "You get tired of being beat, tell Raven that Yang wants to talk to her."

The second fighter, the one who had waited, was now looking at Yang with a little more respect. Yang rolled her shoulders and crooked her fingers invitingly. 

As they started, Blake saw one of the spectators messing with his scroll, and she had a brief war with herself before deciding not to panic about that. She had to hope that Yang knew what she was doing. 

A new woman came through the door during the third fight, and Blake didn't miss the way the others looked slightly relieved. Nora had once coined Yang's style "technical brawler" (which Glynda said was not a thing). She liked hitting people, but a lot of it was body shots and leg kicks, damage adding up until she went for the kill. But she was slowing, and Blake had seen her surreptitiously shaking out her right arm during a break. 

Now, as Blake eyed the newcomer, the last exchange finished: Yang retreating from a flurry of punches, some of which got through to tag her head and shoulders. But she reset and snapped a hard kick at the man's knee, which she had been working on, and this time it gave out. He let out a muffled shout and fell to one side, clutching it, and Yang stood there for a few moments, chest heaving, before noticing that everyone's attention had shifted behind her. 

She turned, putting one hand to her hip in a cocky pose, to take in the newcomer. Short dark hair and pale eyes, choker, gloves that she kept on even as she shed her coat. "You're out of your depth," she said casually, contempt edging her voice. 

"Yeah?" said Yang. "Come show me."

Yang and the new woman squared off. She carried less muscle than Yang, but was quick and had good timing. After a minute of circling and feinting, she started testing in earnest, light quick jabs interspersed with calf kicks. And Yang was looking winded.

Blake was worried about the match; that was the only excuse for what happened next. A few of the spectators, including the first man Yang had sucker-punched, had circled the edge of the room while Blake was distracted and gotten close enough to make a grab for her. A scuff on the floor and a flicker in her peripheral vision were her only warning, barely an instant to react. As it always did, her Semblance stepped between her and danger.

Their hands closed on the arms of a shadow, a grayed-out copy of Blake while the real one darted away. But the way the fight on the floor was facing, the whole flash of action was in Yang's view. She roared, eyes blazing red and hair bursting from its ponytail in a mass of crackling flame. The other woman darted back a step, gathering herself to respond--

"HOLD!" A new voice cracked across the room like a gunshot. Heads swiveled. A tall woman dressed in red and black stood at the back of the gym, partly sheltered by a corner where she had been watching unobtrusively. Her face was covered by an expertly worked Grimm mask, hair and feathers falling together down her back in a mane.

The Tribe stood down instantly, and even the woman facing off with Yang froze. Yang took a moment longer, then shifted to look at the newcomer. She tossed her head when she saw her, flames dying out. Pale purple again, her eyes locked with the Grimm mask as if she could stare all the way through to the face behind. She said nothing, chest heaving like a bellows, and Blake wondered if they were both about to meet death by Tribal mob.

The moment stretched, and finally broke when the woman jerked her head toward a door behind her. "Outside. Vernal," and Yang's opponent lifted her head, "no one interrupts us."

A scowl flashed across Vernal's face at the dismissal, but she nodded. Raven--it could only be her--turned and stalked out, and after a moment Yang followed, limping slightly. Blake trailed behind, keeping the rest of the Tribe in her sights.

  
  


Out back was a fenced-in concrete area, training space in warmer months but now just an ice-crusted throne room open to the sky. Raven turned, imperious, and her eyes landed on Blake. "And you are?"

Blake stayed by the door leading inside, holding that self-assigned post. Her eyes slid to Yang before returning to Raven. "On her side," she said simply.

The taller woman made what might have been a faint scoff. Behind the mask, Blake couldn't tell if she was amused or annoyed. Blake kept herself still (don't move, don't react, give them nothing to latch onto) and after a moment that predator's head turned back to Yang. "You wanted my attention."

Yang turned her head to one side and spat, clearing her mouth of blood. "Uncle Qrow is missing. You can find him."

"I could," Raven said, voice chilly. "But I'm not sure why I would."

"Because he's  _missing._ We can't track any of his tech. He could... he could be dead. I know you care about that, even if just a bit."

"It must be a very small bit--we've not spoken in years. His business is none of mine." Slight head tilt to the side, then she shrugged. "Besides, I don't need to. He called me."

"He--" Yang looked like she'd been slapped. "What did he  _say?_ "

"Nothing worth repeating." Raven's voice was as impassive as the mask. "Was that all you wanted?"

"No." Yang's voice had a hint of a tremor buried deep, and her hands were curled into fists. "You could at least look me in the face."

After a long breath, Raven raised her hands and lifted the helm. She rested it on one hip, other hand on her sword, still exuding that air of barbaric royalty. Her eyes were blood red, features sharp and brows drawn down, and the scowl was so Qrow-like that Blake' stomach clenched in sudden understanding. This was his... sister? And that meant...?

Raven stepped closer to Yang, scrutinizing her with a detachment that maybe wasn't as perfect as it had appeared a minute ago. "He was drunk. He'll come home when he dries out. That's all there is to it."

Yang's jaw was hard, clenched against a wobble. "How do I know you're telling the truth about talking to him?"

Raven's brows lifted. "Child, why would I care enough to lie? If you haven't learned already, you need to: People are always a disappointment."

"Speak for yourself. I'm a goddamn legend."

For just a second, those red eyes flashed, and Blake tensed. Raven's smile was crooked, bitter, as she put the mask back on. "Cross Tribal territory again, and you're on your own." 

Yang turned, and Blake's heart hurt at the empty look in her eyes. But she was here to play backup, not to make her friend look soft. So she just arched a brow and tipped her head back to indicate the way they'd come. Yang nodded and they left, empty-handed except for fresh bruises.

* * *

Ironwood had still heard nothing from Qrow since that message two nights ago. Nothing for it but to go to the meet and hope that all became clear--at least, as clear as possible between two people who were only connected by aliases and short-term criminal enterprise. It would be foolish to read more into it, to pretend that a handful of extraneous minutes and messages meant any deeper friendship.

Still, he was worried. Not for himself, but for the wasted time and the need to start over with unknown quantities if this relationship--this  _business_ relationship had soured. So he was early to the meeting site, another anonymous Amity zone with no connection to any of the previous spots. This one was almost a compromise between Qrow's penchant for sleaze and his own for clean and sparse lines: a retro bar with strategic neon lighting in magenta and teal, plenty of deep shadows, and loudly asymmetric art on the walls.

He'd been there only a few minutes when he saw, not the dark-haired avatar he was hoping for, but a pair of figures in the entryway staring at him. One was the woman from the first meeting, molten gold and seething energy. (Yang, he didn't officially know but had tracked down.) The other was slimmer, statuesque, and he had time to take in an impression of a living diamond before they both headed his way.

That wasn't the plan. He sat up straighter, almost regretting giving up the psychological edge of height with this skin. Yang slid into the booth across from him, followed at a more measured pace by the other. Up close, the impression of diamond remained, transparent but brilliantly hard. She was clothed in a gown of white opal, no softer looking than the rest of it, and a faint constellation of lights framed her head.

"You wanted to do the talking, talk," said Yang to her partner.

Ironwood saw no need to pretend this was normal. "Where's Qrow?"

The diamond woman looked at him, inscrutable. "Missing since the job. I don't suppose you'd know anything about that."

"Missing how? What happened?" He'd kept a discreet eye on the news as well as some likely quieter report channels, and there had been no mention of a disturbance at the site.

"This is bullshit," said Yang. "He's either lying or we're wasting our..." She cut off as the other one cast a sharp look at her, and Ironwood wished he could read that message stream.

Turning back to him, the glittering woman folded her hands in front of her, a reset gesture. "Our deal was for the full contents of the building mainframe and any satellite systems. No hard copies, void contract if the intrusion was detected." 

"Correct. I saw that the data has uploaded to the stash server, but not the encryption key." That handoff was supposed to be now, along with payment. "Were you caught?"

"Please," she said, and there was something  _very_ familiar about that snap, but he couldn't track it down now--"we were in and out in three hours. No alarms, we spoofed the surveillance. It was a clean job, and Qrow hasn't been seen since."

It might be better to give no information at all, but something was way off, and he couldn't tell what. "He sent me a message just after 2 AM. He didn't say much, but sounded angry, and hasn't responded to anything since." Suspicion whispered, and he listened. "It wasn't a clean job, and you're trying to find out if I know why. I don't."

He thought that was a hit, from the look the golden woman shot her companion.  _Not telling each other everything, are you?_

Some tension was gathering between them, but before it could take form, Yang sat bolt upright. "Gotta go," she said, and vanished.

The other one actually pinched her forehead, then went still for a moment. Something had happened. He bit his tongue and waited. After a minute, she focused on him again. And he wondered: On the scraps of footage he'd seen, none of them but Qrow looked more than barely adult. If things had gone differently, would this be Penny's life?

He thought about what he could say. Enough to be true, something like a peace offering. Carefully, he said, "My source listed it as a possible corporate black site. Few specifics, but enough to check the contents of the computers." Arthur had highly-placed friends in Atlas, but he hadn't always been there, and he was arrogant enough that he sometimes neglected to cover his tracks.

She looked at him, and a glimmer shifted in those faceted depths. "What about the basement?"

He shook his head. "It's in a flood zone. There is no basement."

Another weighing second, then she reached up to pluck one of the stars from her constellation. It solidified in her hand and she set it down on the table, a hard little mote of light. His turn to look at her for a beat, before pressing his hand over it and scanning the data. There wasn't much, just a handful of image files.

He looked, and after a moment they coalesced into meaning. He lifted his hand from the table as if he'd been burned. Useless gesture; the pictures were already his to keep. "I see," he said, as scenarios spun in his head. What had Arthur been involved in?

"Do you?" she asked, hands folded tightly together again. "I haven't decided that the whole thing wasn't some kind of setup. You like giving tests, don't you?"

He studied her, trying to feel his next step in the dark. "This would be a stupid test to give. Springing an unannounced biohazard site on a team I'm only starting to know?" This wasn't right; he wasn't reaching her. Stop trying to be clinical. "I have difficult, dangerous work to do, and we're both testing each other. I wouldn't jeopardize that for the sake of a quick shock."

He flipped through the images again, let himself feel the horror instead of trying to segment it away. "I don't know who these three people are. But I can try to find out."

A tiny crack in the armor; she nodded, a little too quickly. "They just... left them down there. Covered up the entrance and left."

"Yes." Alive at the time, from the looks of it. And because that didn't bear much imagining, he looked up from where his eyes had drifted on the table to her face. "I know you have no reason to believe me, but I like Qrow. Annoying as he can be." That earned him a tiny snort, probably the best sign so far. "If there's anything I can do to help find him..."

She shook her head. "Payment for the key. If you have anything else lined up... think hard about whether it might have more buried surprises."

He didn't like it, too much left hanging, but sensed it was the best he'd get for now. It didn't take long to wrap after that.

She rose, and the violet lights behind her bent and shattered as they refracted through her body. Giving him one last inscrutable look, she said, "He got back twenty minutes ago. If he survives his next conversation with me, maybe we'll work together again."

She vanished, leaving him to wonder what the hell he'd gotten himself into.


	9. Fallout

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Qrow is back, but life isn't totally back to normal. Winter is deputized to collect some information.

_"They're doing it again."_

_"This isn't what my research was meant for. This is monstrous."_

_"Lucky you."_

_Storm winds roaring, metal giving way._

_"Time for another adjustment."_

_A high-pitched giggle. "Now, I can't remember what I was worried about."_

_"Get away from me. I'm poison."_

_"You don't have to stay here. I'm getting out."_

_A swing, a miss, disequilibrium, a fist connecting. Fireworks._

_"You can't kill Salem."_

* * *

Weiss used to have a closet bigger than Qrow's room. 

Admittedly, it was less slovenly than she expected. Some pictures on the wall: younger Ruby and Yang, the kids with Summer and Tai. Artwork that probably dated from the same period--though Ruby's current handwriting wasn't much better.

The ceiling was the real surprise. It was crisscrossed by threads in a rainbow of colors, and suspended from them was a collection of tiny birds. There were some in clay or metal, a few in paper, a couple in wood or glass. She vaguely remembered seeing Ruby bring one home, but she'd never known where they went before now.

She looked at the miniature flock overhead, and listened to Qrow's troubled breathing, and tried to decide if she had done the right thing with Tinman.

Finally, Qrow stirred with a mostly-conscious groan. His eyes cracked open and ran over her, Harbinger propped in the corner, his necklace on the hook by his bunk with the sideways cross and the four-leaf clover pin. Then back to her. "Ng."

"Are you coherent enough to hear me? I have two things to say, and I'm not interested in repeating them." Her voice sounded cold in her ears, but she didn't know how to soften it without losing her composure. 

"...Sure?" His voice was rough and he winced as if even that much noise hurt the inside of his head.

Weiss handed him a bottle of water and watched him fumble it. (Fractures in one hand, battered knuckles on both, dislocated shoulder.) She let him handle it, waited until he had spilled water on his swollen face and gotten a bit in his mouth. She reminded herself to stay furious.

He made it easier when he slewed bloodshot eyes back to her and took in her stony expression. "Ugh. Can't a guy wake up in a puddle of his own vomit in peace?"

"You missed the meet," she said tersely. Left her holding the bag, Ruby scared but giving her the go-ahead. Yang vanishing midway when he appeared at the door, messaging from the clinic until she told them to stop updating unless they wanted her to  _do_ something.

Qrow squinted, and clearly didn't find enough information in his memory to argue with her. "Hn. Well, fuck that guy."

Weiss clenched her fists until her nails bit into her palms. "Do you think we just...  _stop,_ without you? No, don't answer that. Later. Here's the first thing I wanted to say: I'm mostly incapable of being disappointed by people"--lie, but run with it--"but your nieces think you hung the moon. They were starting to think you died _._ "

He looked up at the arch of his bunk, apparently deciding it hurt too much to sit up more than he'd been propped. (Two cracked ribs, orbital fracture, range of bruises.) He managed another drink, and she saw the way his eyes slid around in search of the flask. "Nobody lasts forever. They got through Raven and Summer and Tai. Sooner or later, they'll get through me too."

Her jaw dropped. "So... because they've lost three parental figures, you think they'll be all right when the last one goes? That's one of the most self-centered things I've ever heard, and I was basically raised by tundra wolves in suits."

He reached out for the necklace, realized he couldn't put it on, and left it wrapped around his hand like a talisman. Stared at it for a second. "That's one thing," he said finally, voice flat. "What's the rest?"

He was being  _such_ an asshole and the only way through it was to stay cold, or she'd start crying--for who, she wasn't sure. "The last couple of years, you and Ruby and Yang have made me feel at home here. I'm grateful for that. But if this," she gestured, "becomes a thing, I will leave. Not because I want to, but because I have to."

That got through, words floating across the water to wherever he was drifting. He tipped his head to look at her, face grave. "Do what you have to do," he said.

She didn't know if he was pushing her to leave or proud of her for being willing to or both, but either way her eyes stung and she stood abruptly to go. But paused at the door, words like bits of glass in her mouth that she had to spit out. "Did you..." Deep breath. "I mean, were any of them..." She couldn't find her way to the end of the sentence.

He let his head roll back, draping one arm over it to shade his eyes. "I didn't know any of them. After my time."

_If you didn't want to know, you shouldn't have asked._ She left, and decided to let the others figure out he was awake on their own.

* * *

Late lunch, eating by a fountain on one of the airy Atlas promenades. People passed in an orderly and prosperous stream, advertisements beckoned from half a dozen stores, and the water burbled and plashed beside them. It smeared into a friendly-sounding hubbub that confounded eavesdropping, making it almost possible to relax.

"So," Winter said to Ironwood, "Penny asked me if you were dating someone." 

He choked on his noodles, and she raised a helpful hand to slap him on the back until he waved her off. After a few seconds and a drink, he wheezed, "Why did she ask  _you?_ "

"Something about diversifying her sources of information." Winter watched him with an expression of bland intrigue that she had spent years perfecting. "Naturally I told her I didn't know, but she made me promise to look into it. I would feel bad if I didn't follow through."

He looked at her sourly. "Very considerate. The answer is no."

"Of course."

Several bites later, watching a midair light display for the Vale Plaza show, he muttered, "I made a friend, that's all. Sort of. There's nothing going on."

Winter, who had interrogation training, said nothing. 

He  _knew_ what she was doing, and his shoulders still started to hunch defensively. He straightened them. "Besides, I think we're fighting."

"So... there's nothing going on, but also you're fighting." Winter's bland just-checking-the-facts tone was also pretty flawless. 

"That's about the size of it." He tried not to sound grumpy. A minute later, he had more or less patted down a blanket of reality over that kicking lump of mixed feelings. More quietly, he said, "I don't have time for something like that, anyway. Too much to keep track of. And trying to start something in Atlas? Nothing grows here."

That was getting too real, so he clamped his jaw shut. Winter looked sidelong at him, frowning a little as if trying to decide whether to say more. He prayed that she wouldn't. Finally, she said, "It's not my business and I'll drop it after this. But Penny said you've been smiling more, recently. I think she's right about that."

"She's right about many things, but we don't always agree about what to do with it." Someday, he wouldn't need to keep things from Penny anymore, no more listening ears or system snoops that could pry into her core. Someday, this beautiful glass and steel cage would crack open and she would leave it all behind. Maybe him, too.

He was drifting too far, out in public, and Winter's voice called him back. "I didn't really understand, before I talked to her, how different she is from the Pillars. I mean," she added hastily, "I knew they weren't the same, but... it's night and day."

He nodded, reorienting. "Not that it's easy to talk to the Pillars--Watts and Steele have them locked up tight, even with my clearance. But they started as machines and you can't mistake them for anything else. The personalities they have are... stunted, is the kindest way to put it. Penny is one of a kind." He sometimes wondered if Pietro felt it was worth it, losing everything to make that happen.

Winter nodded, keeping the rest of her thoughts close. "I think... I'm going to take the job in psyops."

"I thought you might." And he ruthlessly squashed the feeling that his job was about to get a little lonelier. She was a trusted colleague, not his emotional support animal.

"It'll probably happen shortly after the Plaza show. Speaking of..."

"Yes, we've been hiding long enough. Let's go run one more set of disaster scenarios and try to whittle the response times down."

* * *

Qrow had a good plan: Take his self-loathing out to the bar for a date, stay until the current hangover was replaced by the next drunk. He made it to the couch before he had to stop for a rest. Then Ruby appeared, dropped a pillow and half her body weight on him, and activated what he was pretty sure was her second Semblance of finding cartoons to watch at any hour. Now she was sacked out across his lap, drooling into the pillow and making it impossible to leave quietly.

Some things never changed. He brushed a ruffle of hair out of her face and remembered the first day he met her, met Summer.

  
  


_He looked down at the tiny, dark-haired bundle that the silver-eyed woman was holding out to him. "I don't think that's a good idea."_

_Standing in the apartment doorway, she bumped the baby lightly against his chest. "You're Raven's brother, right?" At his cautious nod, "She vouched for you. So you can either hold this magical creature and contemplate the transcendent mystery of life, or you can go clean up the shit and vomit she just spewed everywhere. Which her sister is even now probably starting to finger-paint with."_

_"Well, when you put it that way."_

  
  


He let his head fall back and his eyes drop closed, felt the headache come and go in ripples and whirlpools. It wasn't getting any better, that was probably a bad sign. 

Pain shot through his shoulder, down his arm, and he jerked awake with a gasp. Vertiginous second, then his vision stabilized enough to recognize Yang, looking down at him with red-rimmed eyes. " _Ow,_ " he hissed, trying not to disturb Ruby, whose third Semblance was sleeping through a fucking freight train.

Yang didn't look remorseful; she looked pissed. Volume lowered to match his, she said, "Anything else?"

Boom, boom, boom, went the headache. It hurt so much it was hard to care, but he reached for something he should want to say. "...Sorry?"

This time he was expecting the punch to his shoulder, almost welcomed the bright hot flare of it and glared right back at her. Could feel the stubbornness settling in, ugly but poison-strong. 

Ruby stirred, muttering in her sleep, and both Qrow and Yang froze. After a moment, Yang continued softly. "I'm not going to bother saying you're an asshole, because you don't care. But Blake is like this close to bailing on the team, and if that happens, I will never forgive you. So whatever your bullshit is right now, you  _handle it,_ hear me?"

He closed his eyes. Dizzy.  _You're a piece of shit and you don't deserve any of them. So you're going to put on your human suit and do this._ Opened his eyes, drawing in a slow breath. "I hear you."

She nodded, and he saw that her eyes had an extra liquid shine--also saw the green tinge of fading bruises, a split lip halfway to healed. He frowned, not remembering those from... whenever he last remembered things. "What happened to you?"

Her eyes widened, and for a second he thought she was going to flop right down and spill, let him make whatever it was better. Then she shook her head, blinking rapidly. "Don't try to be my dad now. You don't have the practice." Left, while he was still stunned from that one.

A minute passed, muted sounds from the screen and flickering lights on the ceiling that he stared blankly at. "Uncle Qrow," mumbled Ruby, "tomorrow you'll go to the doctor, right?"

"Yeah, kid."

* * *

There was a rally in Amity that Penny wanted to go to and wanted Ruby to explain to her, and Ruby's ability to explain politics was a work in progress, so she nagged Weiss into coming along. The surprise addition was Blake, which maybe said more about the mood inside the apartment than anything else, but Ruby wasn't going to complain about a group trip. 

She knew as soon as she got there that safety in numbers was the right move. Big social stuff in Amity got intense. The space had been set up as a stylized version of Mantle, but it was a weird half-dreaming funhouse version--streets that were three steps long or went in circles, buildings tilted just off true, stars overhead like swirls of paint. Everywhere was covered in graffiti, but it wasn't static; it grew and warped, shrank or intensified, as people added to and changed it. Now and then a patch would break off the scenery entirely and drift, ghostlike, until it joined with a new linkage or shattered into vapor. 

They were meeting at the Wired Ash, a tree made of cable and lights, where security cameras chirped in the branches and throngs of young people gathered to argue about their favorite causes. Penny was already there, looking enraptured. 

"Oh boy," said Weiss, after one look around. Blake didn't say anything, but her shadow flattened itself a little more against the nearest patch of tree trunk. 

"Salutations," said Penny, dragging her eyes away from the view long enough to beam at all of them. "I have so many questions." 

It occurred to Ruby that maybe she should've warned the others about Penny. Oh well--too late now, sorry not sorry.

The next hour or so was a whirlwind. People were agitating about Mantle's education system (a papier-mâché school in flames, silver wires running out to the heads of vacant-eyed dolls in apartment buildings), its crumbling infrastructure (icicle-clogged heating tunnels that Ruby balked at, even in model form), the corrupt politicians who kept tossing the ball back and forth rather than fixing anything. A bright spot where Robyn Hill's crew spread news about shelters. There was an area where one artist had drawn factories and workers with loving care, another had painted the same factories as desiccated corpses, and a third had added a giant tick with Jacques Schnee's face, thirstily sucking out the last of the blood. 

Through it all, the Grimm lurked and prowled: hiding in the dark corners of tenements where children went hungry, running in packs with guns-blazing gang members (though careful to avoid specific gang colors), roosting in the highest towers and casting shadows over the tiny lives below. Ruby couldn't help scribbling a couple of stick figures with swords going after the Grimm, though Weiss told her to knock it off when she noticed. ("What, do you want to get on the  _special_ watch lists?") 

Penny gathered wisps from every place they visited, rolling a growing ball of thread in her hands. She asked about everything, and sometimes it was really basic things that anyone from Mantle should know, but sometimes it was way over Ruby's or even Weiss' head. She asked about the Faunus rights protestors that had staked out a corner and defended it against jeers and pitying looks alike. Blake chipped in tersely there, opening up a bit more as the depth of Penny's interest became clear. 

"What's that?" Penny asked suddenly, looking down the half-height model of an alley into a fog-shrouded forest where dark descended immediately under the trees. Blake didn't answer, but headed that way, and the others followed. The noise fell off sharply behind them and the trees towered overhead in a sudden trick of perspective. There was a pattern on the brickwork that blended into bark, and after a moment Ruby saw that it was the same letters over and over: MFC.

Weiss noticed about the same time and paused, shaking her head. "I'll wait out here." 

Confused, Ruby saw that Blake was disappearing among the trees, Penny just behind her. She hurried to follow. After several steps of darkness with only blacklight shadows of pine needles to show the ground, she stumbled into a little cave. Or--a shrine? It was weird, and she kept her mouth shut as she looked around the small arched space that was nonetheless large enough to hold thousands of candles. There was a mosaic of broken glass on the far wall, swirling figures and suggestions of flame surrounding the words  _Menagerie Free City,_ and  _oh._ Ruby stuck by the entrance, clasped Penny's hand to keep her there too, as Blake crossed to the wall to kneel and leave a candle among the photographs and mementos. 

Back outside, Blake walked ahead, the other three a few steps behind. "There is a great deal of conflicting information about this," Penny said quietly, as diffident as Ruby had ever heard her. 

"It was a tragedy." Weiss was just as subdued. "Even if it was never going to work, things shouldn't have happened the way they did."

Even in Amity, Blake had sharp ears. She stiffened and turned. Her eyes gleamed in the dusk of her avatar. "If it was never going to work, why did they send in the Paladins? Why did they burn the schools and level the hydroponics towers? If it was going to fail on its own, they didn't need to murder it."

"I--" started Weiss.

Blake shook her head. "After everything, you're still from Atlas." Weiss sucked in a breath, and Blake's head turned to Penny. "Here--for your collection." She tossed a tangle of thread her way, a clotted nebula of red stars shot through with smoke. 

"Thank you," said Penny, very softly. After a moment, Blake nodded, then she slid away and disappeared among the shadows.

Penny looked down at the skein in her hands, and she shook her head. "All these problems. Some of them are very hard to see the way through, but others are just optimization. The infrastructure repair, the food scarcities--there is enough computing power in Atlas to work it out. This is  _fixable._ "

Weiss was tired and cynical. "It's not about processor cycles, it's about money."

"That is an incorrect way to order the world."

Weiss looked at Ruby, mouthing,  _Where did you FIND her?_

Ruby shrugged. "Hey, should you..." 

"Yeah." Weiss' shoulders slumped. "I need to go apologize. Penny, it's been weird but fun." And in a brief prism twist, she was gone too. 

Ruby let out a breath. "Woof. My head hurts." 

Penny looked thoughtful. "Metaphorically, so does mine. Do you need to go, or shall we find someplace quiet for me to spin? I would not mind the company."

"Lead on," Ruby yawned, because the apartment would be hella tense until at least half its occupants went to sleep, and she would bet her next three rounds of caffeine that she could outlast that. 

* * *

The next afternoon, Qrow balked outside the storefront, taking in the bars over the windows and the neon outlines of skulls and crutches. "Are you sure this is a clinic? It looks more like a pawn shop."

"I'm sure," said Ruby, dragging at his arm until he winced and shambled after her. 

Inside was small and cluttered, basic fix-it supplies punctuated by an impressive collection of Grimm skull plates. "Payment up front, no refunds," came the bored patter from behind the counter, then what Qrow had mistaken for some kind of wizened teddy bear sat up straight and blinked shining blue goggles at him. "Ah, the jigsaw man. Wondered if I'd see you alive again."

"Gah," he said as Ruby quick-stepped behind him and pushed him forward. 

"I brought him back like you said to," she said proudly.

The old woman leaned sideways to beam at her. "So you did. How has he been?" 

"Sleeping a lot? I don't think he's healing right, though." Qrow tried to twist around to glare at her, but Ruby had popped up by his side again. "I think it's like you said, about his aura."

"That it's pretty fucked? Yes, that was some good doctoring from me."

"I'm right here," he complained. "And I don't--"

"--like doctors, yes, yes. Your nieces told me. I think you may have even vomited something to that effect. If you call me Maria, and don't ask to see my license, I'm sure we can both squint and get through this." The blue slits on the goggles widened, and he fought the urge to lean back. "Or you can apologize for interrupting an old lady's nap and scram, and wait for it to get better on its own."

"...Fine."

  
  


A while later, she finished her preliminary prodding and scans in the examination room. The walls in there had been painted with surrealist anatomical diagrams, and the diagnostic equipment was heavily duct-taped but mostly seemed to work. Ruby waited outside with a video game and Qrow tried to pretend that he was just fine with complex tasks like sitting and standing, thank you, and not about to throw up or trying to keep an eye on all the machinery all at once. 

Finally, Maria made a disapproving huff--at least her fourth--and sat back. "Healing poorly, wish I could say I was surprised. Here's the part I didn't say to your girls. Some of the neural pathways have shallow but extensive scarring, consistent with repeated overexposure to Dust. Your aura probably tends to run a bit depleted, and when it breaks, it doesn't regenerate for shit. That's without the alcohol poisoning, which just does wonders. Stop me when I get to a part you don't know."

"I'm listening." 

"I doubt it, but still. You should see a neurosurgeon, as of years ago. And probably a therapist, for..." She waved a hand in a circle, roughly indicating his whole deal. 

He concentrated on buttoning up his shirt. "Not gonna happen."

Fifth disapproving harumph. "Because I'm brilliant as well as being a complete fox, I knew that. The backup, entirely worse option is to take an aura booster. Any experience with those?"

He grimaced. "Yeah. I'll be sick as a dog for a night, then it'll stabilize." He did a quick check of himself--hand tremors, joint stiffness, state of the headache--and grimaced again with more feeling. "I'll make it. Should probably eat something first, though. Dry heaves are the worst."

Despite her sardonic tone so far, Maria looked at him with something akin to sympathy. "Delivery menus are behind the counter, next to the playing cards," she said. "Go get rid of your niece, unless you want her to see this. And Qrow?"

He turned, already slouching toward the doorway. 

"You should talk to somebody about how things got here. Even if it's just a friend."

He smirked. "You're a sweetheart, Maria. All my friends are dead."

* * *

Cinder Fall had started four conversations in the last month. Four different venues, four different thugs as far beneath her as the mass of humanity was below them. The Project had expanded her mind in ways they couldn't even  _imagine._

Sienna Khan, lounging in the crook of a tree that was devouring a building, in one of the Grimm-blighted wild pockets that had sprung up over the years. Teeth sharp, hands smeared with glistening black.

Roman Torchwick, flame-red hair immaculately coiffed, sitting in the back of a swanky club while music throbbed and dancers writhed on the floor outside. 

Raven Branwyn, standing tall in the rusty carcass of a factory, her followers perched on the catwalks and hulks of machinery around them.

Adam Taurus, all restless energy and caged anger, walking through a warehouse where masked fanatics ferried packages in the background. 

To each of them, the basic offer had been the same: here are the weapons, here are the access codes, here is the cost for each, yes this is real. No, you don't want to know where the codes came from, but here's a free sample. Just to show that Cinder could be generous, if given proper respect. 

Slightly different embroidery on the basic offer, vary the color to catch the eye or the ego of the leader in question. To Sienna, a reminder that the Taurins were gaining ground in the developed sectors of the city, and that hiding and playing at wilderness camp scouts was no way to feast on the marrow of your enemies. To Roman and Adam, a hint at the weaponry that would be exposed at Vale Plaza, a priceless haul to scavenge if they played their cards right. To Raven, a musing that the Atlas dignitaries would be out in force, a chance to bleed them in a way that the ragtag Tribe could never do through the shining walls of the arcology.

Now, back to collect. Who would be smart, and who didn't want to be part of the new order? (You couldn't call it that out loud; that just made you sound like a supervillain. But Cinder felt the seasons changing, heard the crackling fires of the old world on the breeze. She knew.)

Sienna Khan said, "Get this baseline bitch out of my sight before I tear her head off." And that night there was a little forest fire, right in the heart of the city.

Roman Torchwick said, "I'm a simple man and I know what I want for the holidays. We'll take the whole package. And if you're not busy after this...?" He had such an unselfconscious leer that it wrapped all the way around to charming, and he seemed to mean it despite the burn scars that rippled up Cinder's arm and one side of her face. "Maybe next time," she said.

Raven and the Tribe skipped the second meeting.  _No,_ said the note, pinned to the spot by a steel spike and signed with a sigil of a stylized mask. The wind whistled above, cold and empty, and Cinder decided she would hunt them down later. A girl should treat herself sometimes.

Adam said, "I'm in. But only if you tell me who else you sold this to."

"Oh?" said Cinder. "So suspicious. Tell me your conspiracy theory."

He paused by a crate of half-refined Dust product. The Faunus doing the repackaging didn't have proper protective gear, she noted. Maybe they didn't know; maybe they didn't expect to live long enough to feel all the side effects. Adam, facing her with a trace of a smile below his half-mask, didn't seem concerned either way. "Basers don't go to Faunus first for this kind of work, unless blaming the Faunus is part of the plan. So either you're cutting other gangs in as well, or you're planning a half-assed attack and think I'm the idiot to carry it out for you. Which is it?"

Cinder smiled wide, knowing what it did to her face. Behind her, Emerald and Mercury shifted restlessly, but they knew better than to go off without her signal. "Droogs. And your striped counterpart was too trigger-happy to recognize a good thing." 

He barked a laugh. "Story of her life. I suppose you're willing to sell me more exclusive access for a higher fee?"

She wouldn't, but she might lie and say she had. "Perhaps."

He waved a hand dismissively. "A little competition doesn't worry me. We can all burn together."

All in all, not a bad yield. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A+ coping skills Qrow, that will definitely fix everything.
> 
> Coming up next: The Vale Plaza dedication, where nothing can possibly go wrong.


	10. Vale Plaza

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's a party. People are happy at those!

Late morning, and Ironwood was in his office running the final checks before leaving to join the Vale Plaza security team. It was a bad day for the two halves of his body--his timing had been off, grip missed on his coffee mug, little things but he knew the signs. He'd needed sedatives to sleep, couldn't afford to be exhausted today. But they never seemed to hit the two sides exactly the same, because part of him still felt mired in the half-dreaming paralysis that had passed the night.

He cleared his mind with a familiar routine. Winter called it his backseat driving traffic report: clock the resource flow in other divisions, look for anything unusual that might connect to his domain. There'd been an uptick in losses of older Knight units, small in absolute numbers but a couple of standard deviations above the norm. That was Hazel's problem, but something useful might show up on the drone logs. He told the minder to track it down--match up the unit numbers with last location tags, check for active or passive eyes in the area and classify the activity.

The feeling of being half out of step with himself didn't pass entirely, but it receded. It was time to go. But first... "Penny," he said, tapping the call button on his desk. "I don't know when I'll be back tonight. It depends on how rowdy the show is and when it winds down."

"I understand," she said. "Though it is also possible for you to stay longer to enjoy yourself. Recommended, even."

He huffed a quiet laugh. "Very subtle. Will you be sending Winter after me for a report?"

"Maybe." After a moment, "But also, there will be a great deal of music and art. It seems a shame to miss it all." To her, of course, it wasn't a tedious job, but a colorful party happening on the other side of a thick glass wall.

"All right. If I can make it through the evening without my ship crashing, I'll find something to enjoy before I come home. Even if it keeps me late."

"Excellent," she said. "I love you."

"Love you too." And after all, it had been a while since he'd physically left Atlas. It might be a nice break.

* * *

Ruby hadn't nagged _that_ hard to make everyone go to the Vale Plaza dedication. She just pointed out that it was the biggest free thing all year, and that it would really mean a lot to her if they could do this together. Cue big eyes, people giving in.

She hadn't counted on everyone splitting up as soon as they got there. Yang dipped out immediately with some flimsy excuse about shopping, then Blake went off a few minutes later. Then Uncle Qrow, who had been quiet the last few days but was looking better and had at least found a clean shirt for today.

  
  


_RedHood: hey_

_RedHood: at the vale plaza thingy_

_RedHood: want to meet up if your here?_

_Ha'Penny: I wish I could be there, because that would be excellent._

_Ha'Penny: Tell me who your favorite show is so I can look them up?_

_RedHood: cool_

  
  


She sighed, looking up from her scroll. Weiss was across the table, sipping at an overpriced fruity drink and pretending to listen to the nearby band. Ruby thought pretending, because Weiss' eyes kept sliding in the direction of the central plaza and its main stage.

"Nope," said Ruby.

Weiss blinked. "Nope, what?"

"Nope, you're not going to go over and watch the big dedication thing."

Weiss finally turned to face her, looking irritated. "Why aren't I? Anyway, I never said I was going to."

Ruby successfully resisted the urge to stick her tongue out--and people said she needed to grow up, _hah._ She was plenty mature. "You're not, because if you do, everyone will have ditched me and that's really mean. And I'm not going because it would be _way_ boring. Besides, you'll just be ranting about it for a week."

"Hate-watching Atlas speeches is a perfectly good hobby. You should pay more attention to what's happening in the world."

Ruby was opening her mouth to make an ill-considered retort when a woman's voice asked, "Pay more attention why? Hey, Weiss." Ruby looked around and saw Emerald and Mercury, dressed for the cold and looking chipper.

"Hey," said Weiss. "Because otherwise you don't see what's coming."

Mercury shrugged. "Who cares, though? It's gonna happen anyway. Why waste time anticipating?"

"Ugh. Emerald?" Weiss appealed to the other woman, who shrugged.

"I'm with you. Don't bother with Mercury, though; he's too cool to care about things." Mercury smirked and didn't disagree. Emerald cast a look around, then back to Weiss and Ruby. "Mind if we hang out for a bit? We still don't know many people on this side of town."

Ruby perked up. "You bet. Hey, what kind of music do you like? I'm supposed to get recommendations for my friend, and I can't even spell half the stuff they're showing here."

*

The Fangs arrived through the tunnels in a quiet trickle. Too many Faunus showing up would draw attention, so they took the underground routes that nobody ever thought about, the world under their feet. Cracking security gates was old news--not a trivial task, but a solved one, something you could factor into your timing. So they built up at set locations, targets assigned, clocks synchronized. Bits of light and noise filtered down, a party they would never be invited to. Adam waited for dusk to fade into night, tapping a steady rhythm with his finger on his sword.

*

Elsewhere, Blake had found a small side stage and a corner table in one of the heated tents. She was curled around a cup of coffee and when Qrow saw her, he almost turned and left. Then told himself to fucking do it, paid for his drink, and went over. "Hey. Can I sit?"

Blake flicked her eyes up to him, then nodded. He folded himself down and hunched over his own coffee, breathing in the warm steam for a minute while sitar music curled around them.

"So." Why was this so hard? "Yang said..." _Fuck._ "Okay, restart. I've kind of been an asshole lately and it's probably messing things up for the team and I wanted to say that... I'm working on it."

Blake listened with an opaque expression and blinked at him slowly when he finished. "Yang told you to apologize to me?"

"Huh? No. I mean, not exactly. But she thinks you're going to leave, and that it's probably my fault, and odds are good that she's not wrong about that. So I figured I should... find out? And see if I can do something to make it right." _Stop talking, what a fucking train wreck._ He took a drink to shut himself up, and of course scalded his tongue.

Blake took a careful sip, still watching him. Looked down at her cup, then finally back up at him. She said, "Don't take this the wrong way, but not everything is about you."

He blinked and laughed, louder and longer than it was probably worth. She looked startled, but then one corner of her mouth curved up as he eventually composed himself and took a less treacherous drink of his coffee. "Ahh. Thanks. That hurt, but I needed that. Okay." He re-focused, studying her face more carefully. "So if it's not me, what is it?"

She broke eye contact, watching the musician, then shook her head a little. Frowned. "Don't get me wrong, the disappearing act you pulled wasn't great. We're not fine, for that. But." She looked down at her cup again.

There was a long pause. Qrow waited it out.

At last, she said, "Have you ever been someplace that wasn't good? That was actually pretty bad, but it seemed like it was the only place that you fit?"

Qrow's hands tightened on his cup enough to send a few drops sloshing over the edge. After a second, he said, "Yeah. I know a couple things about that." Raven, leaving. ( _"You don't have to stay here. I'm getting out.") Begging_ him to come with her, but by that point he couldn't see anywhere to go outside the Project.

Breathing going irregular. This wasn't about him. He sucked in some air, then some coffee to ground himself. Mediocre, overpriced, here and now. "But," he managed to say, "there's another thing that happens, where you find yourself someplace better. And you can't get comfortable, because you keep waiting for it to fall apart. Waiting for people to notice that you're the thing that doesn't fit, you're the problem."

Blake drew up one knee under her chin, which shouldn't have been possible to do gracefully in winter clothing. "That," she said softly. "Tell me about that thing."

He leaned forward, letting his shoulders hunch up and letting the music weave a little bubble of privacy around them. Looked down. "When I first met Summer and Tai, I was..." _Barely human._ He ran a hand through his hair, rubbed the back of his neck. "I don't know everything you've done, but you're a good kid. I wasn't. I was mean and distant and just... empty." He shook his head. "We did some Grimm hunting jobs, them and Raven and me. I started spending more time at Summer and Tai's place, around the kids. It all kind of went bit by bit. And they just... they didn't throw me out like they probably should've. They kept treating me like I belonged. And eventually, it was just kind of a done deal, you know? Like one day I looked around and realized I had this little family."

It shouldn't hurt so much, talking about the good parts. But his voice was halting and his throat felt raw. A slim black-gloved hand entered his field of vision and clasped loosely around his fingers, where he was clenching his coffee in a clawlike grip. After a few seconds, his breathing evened out.

He looked up, blinking. "Sorry, I--"

Blake shook her head. Her expression was a little pinched, like she was trying to keep a lid on. "My parents are in prison," she said.

He hadn't known that; you learned not to ask people why they weren't tight with their families. "Sorry."

"Me too." She clasped her hands together, studying them. "It feels... disloyal? Like I'm trying to replace them, if I find somewhere good to stay."

"You don't get just one shot at family, or home," he said. He could believe it, for them. "If you want to see whether this one can work... stay."

Blake was still looking down, but her cheeks went a tint darker, and her hair just barely stirred in a nod.

Qrow leaned back, crossing his legs. "Besides, you make the team better. Why do you think Glynda steered you toward us?"

"Huh? She didn't. She just told me I'd done some decent solo work, and there was this Ruby girl that desperately needed a stealth partner, and oh shit, she totally did." Blake sat there, looking disgusted.

Qrow laughed. "Congratulations, you've been Goodwitched."

"Nora said that people call her that because if you say the words 'bad bitch' within a mile of Beacon, she can hear you."

"No comment," Qrow smirked.

They both sat back and listened to the music in peace, for a bit.

*

The last edge of twilight was vanishing--dark came early, this time of year. The Droogs could have come in with the public, but that meant going through weapons scanners, and that was no fun. So they took the back route, service passages and cleanup alleys, a bribed employee here and a hacked camera there. They gathered in the bottom level of a parking garage that had been commandeered for security staging, but only a small slice was in use. "Boring speeches end and fireworks start in half an hour," Roman murmured, checking the time. "Then, daddy gets himself a Paladin."

*

_BlackCat: Where are you?_

_Yangtastic: Over by the... flower opera thing_

_Yangtastic: idk_

_Yangtastic: I think art may be too classy for me_

  
  


Yang wasn't sulking, she just... didn't know how to not be a bitch to people, right now. She didn't usually hold on to anger or worry. Just, boom, punch or cry it out, think better once the storm has passed. She wasn't used to fighting with Uncle Qrow. She didn't know how to fix it. It kept chasing around in her head, making her snappish.

She was watching some kids chase each other past, wondering if their mothers were looking for them, when a dark-haired face tipped into her field of view. "Hey," said Blake.

Yang summoned a smile. "Hey. What's up--come to explain opera to me?"

Blake glanced over her shoulder. "Somebody's getting married, somebody else is upset about it, they're all too straight for me to care."

Yang snickered. "Wanna walk?"

"Yup."

They went in silence for a bit, shouldering through the noisy crowd, passing from one bubble of music and performance art to another. The city had gone all out, and Yang felt a little bad that she didn't appreciate it more. It just seemed a bit... over the top, with everything else that was breaking down.

"Hey," said Blake, breaking into her thoughts. "About the other day. You good?"

Yang slanted a look sideways at her but Blake was looking ahead, and for a second the shifting festival lights hit her profile in a way that made Yang's heart squeeze. She shoved her hands deeper into her pockets and shrugged, swinging her gaze front again. "Took some lumps, but I'll mend." After a second, "Look, you can just ask."

Blake hummed. "So that was your mom, huh?"

Yang laughed shortly. "Makes you wonder how I have this many fucks to give, huh? But yeah. She split from mom duty pretty much right after they cut the cord. For years I thought Summer was my mom and Ruby's, and that 'Aunt Raven' was just Uncle Qrow's badass sister. Pretty fucking hilarious when I found out." Her voice was bitter, and she took in a deep breath, let it out. Raven wasn't worth getting mad about.

"Ouch," Blake said quietly. "Well, she missed out."

"Damn right. I'm great."

"You are." Blake's voice was still quiet, but emphatic.

Yang looked over at her again and bumped their elbows together lightly, feeling warm in the pit of her stomach. "Look, it's fine, it's old news. But it's cool to keep saying nice stuff about me, if you want."

Blake stopped and caught Yang's elbow with one hand, and Yang stopped too, as if it had been an iron grip instead of a feather touch. "It's _not_ fine. Or, I don't think it is, but that's not what I wanted to say. I wanted to tell you that I'm not leaving."

Yang studied her face--oval, delicate features, light brown skin, that gorgeous dark hair that she kept plaited back. She had a wry sense of humor, but she didn't look like she was joking now, looking straight back at Yang with an intensity that made Yang stand up a little straighter. "Um. What brought this on?"

Blake arched a brow. "It's a small apartment, things get around. And..." Her eyes flitted to one side, "I have been thinking about it. Leaving, I mean. I thought it might be time."

She looked back, and Yang held her breath. "But I'm going to stay. That's what I wanted to tell you. In case, you know, you were worried."

A knot loosened in Yang's chest, and she wanted to reach out and cup Blake's face with her hands and find out if her skin matched the texture and warmth in Yang's imagination. She didn't, but she took in a deep breath, feeling her cheeks go warm. "Okay. Good. I mean... not that I worry, you know, that's probably Weiss' or Qrow's job. But... I'm glad you're staying."

She felt herself grinning like an idiot, and Blake was smiling too, one of those little ones that barely tipped up her mouth but still warmed her eyes. And Blake looked a little nervous maybe, opening her mouth to say something.

Then the light tower behind them went up in an explosion, and the gunfire started.

*

The day had gone so quietly that Ironwood was starting to hope he'd been paranoid. Oh, it wasn't flawless--there were minor scuffles, and several arrests at the weapons scanners, but there were thousands of people here. Hazel's forces at ground level handled everything, and the information flowed up through the network and fed into the constant background murmur of updates in his head. He'd take Carmilla's gloating with a smile if she turned out to be right about the whole thing.

Dark had fallen, and the Atlas and Mantle dignitaries were taking the stage for their mutual back-scratching. He finally had a moment to check on a task he'd given the minder hours ago: the missing Knights, mostly older series but a few of the newer ones too. The minder had scraped nearby camera footage to filter for common elements in the window before the units went offline. The verdict was all green: no anomalies. Which was... improbable, actually. He dipped a layer deeper, normal vision receding as burst summaries played. Everything looked clean until the blip of a maintenance diagnostic, units going offline for a few minutes before rebooting.

Except that maintenance was off-cycle for those cameras, despite coming through with the proper codes.

_You've had extra missing Knights in the last month,_ he messaged Hazel. _And maintenance blackouts on every camera that might have caught something._

There was a short pause before the reply came. _That's... odd. But can it wait an hour? The last thing I need is some clown setting off the pyro early because I got distracted._

Ironwood frowned, already sending a salvo of additional queries. Clearances took a minute--this was Mantle, not Atlas where he could just let his system credentials pull rank for him. In the meantime, he checked the small number of active drones they had in the area, which were supposed to stay low-impact at events where PR mattered. So that net was thinner than he'd like... and again, had some approved-but-unscheduled maintenance blinks in it.

_I think there's a leak on the camera accesses. At least some of our onsite tech is affected. How many entry points are electronic surveillance only?_

_Plenty,_ returned Hazel. _Send me the sites where you think we're blind, I'll have Harriet check it out._

  
  


Below, Jacques Schnee stepped up to the podium and spread his arms in a magnanimous gesture, wide enough to encompass Mantle and all of its grubby little dreams.

(Farther below, Adam Taurus smiled and spoke into the comms. "Blow the bridge first. Central team, I want bodies on the ground. When the artillery shows up, get it disabled and loaded for transport as quickly as possible. Go, brothers.")

The first gunshots were almost lost in the crowd noise, but music quickly died out and screams spread in a widening circle. Dark-clad gang members flowed out of the tunnels, targeting big displays of lights and electronics. Sparks fountained, metal crashed down, and people began to panic and push against each other as they tried to flee.

The Droogs, looking out from their temporary bunker, saw the flashes of light and darkness as the attack started. Roman, who had never been accused of failing to capitalize, blinked and grinned. "Close enough. Let's get started, boys and girls."

  
  


Ruby was checking out some bubblegum pop thing that she thought Penny might go for when the commotion began. Though they couldn't bring their weapons, comms were easy to sneak in, and she turned hers on even as she started jogging for a staircase to get a better view.

"They're attacking the main stage!" Weiss, with lots of background noise.

"Who's attacking?" said Qrow.

"Hold on, I'm trying to get a--woah!" Weiss grunted and there was the sound of impact with a glyph, familiar to anyone who teamed with her. A few seconds later she was back. "Holy shit, the Atlas security robots are _shooting_ at people!"

"There's a fire over here by the dance stage," said Yang. "Blake and I are fine, but this is nuts. What's the plan?"

Ruby ran faster with every word, reaching a second-level terrace and climbing on a railing to scan the scene. "Yikes, okay. Weiss, can you hold a spot until I get there? And Qrow, can you get to Blake and Yang? I know the cops will be coming, but we can't just leave without helping."

She waited for the chorus of affirmatives, then straightened and started running along the railing, looking for a target below.

  
  


On board the Manta, Ironwood was slamming into wall after wall. Electronic jamming had started the moment the trouble below kicked off, and he had to assume no coherent warning had gotten out. Local comms were also compromised and Hazel wasn't answering--he had to hope nothing worse had happened. Now he was reminding himself not to throttle the pilot, who was looking at the displays in horror. "Knights near the main stage are not responding to overrides," the man said, sounding like he didn't believe his own report.

Ironwood's feeds were full of bright sources of information, winking out one by one like the lights below. "Open fire on any Knight not responding to shutdown signals. Highest priority goes to any that are shooting at people." And as the man continued to hesitate, he snapped, _"Now."_

The pilot moved to comply and then the whole ship shuddered. Ironwood rocked sideways, caught himself, and strode to the side window. There was a second Manta in the air with them, its own hold still full of robot security that should be dropping any moment now. Except the ship was listing to one side, looking strangely proportioned, and even as he watched a fire bloomed in the cockpit and lit up writhing shadows for a moment before everything was obscured. The lopsidedness became a hard tilt, its searchlights slewing to the side as it ate itself from within.

"I can't get a lock," the pilot said behind him.

How far did the attack reach? "We can patch through my chip. Give me fifteen seconds to set it up, then hard reset the system."

  
  


On a rooftop below, Cinder held her hands skyward, wiggling her fingers as if to beckon the gunships toward her. Next to her, kneeling with a stolen tablet, Mercury grunted. "Looks like it's uploaded and spreading," he said. "Now what?"

Cinder watched as one of the Mantas fell, careening toward a nearby building. She held up a finger-- _wait one second_ \--until the impact, when hot air gusted past them along with a fresh wave of screams and shattering glass. "You two run along and play. I'll call you when I'm done shooting fish in a barrel." Mercury and Emerald exchanged a look and then hopped down from the roof, descending quickly into the chaos at ground level.

On her other side, a warm chuckle bubbled up into a giggle. Cinder frowned down at the hooded shape. "You're here to watch, not to be seen."

"And I _do_ like to watch," said Tyrian, chin resting on his hands. "But now I'm bored. And unlike your little pets, I don't need mommy's permission to play."

He straightened in a single liquid motion, and Cinder almost shifted back. Then she smirked and looked skyward again, dismissing him. "Suit yourself. But if you show up on camera, Watts will squash you like a... well."

He flicked his tail and smiled, too wide and too many teeth. "It's so cute when you try to give me advice. See you later, crispy cheeks."

Then he was gone, and Cinder cupped her hands around the air, summoning molten spears to take aim at the remaining Manta.

  
  


Blake and Yang had taken up a spot where a stone statue made a little eddy in the panicking crowd. They were back to back, holding their ground and watching for Qrow until Blake hissed, _"Down."_

Both of them ducked and a handful of Droogs ran past, laughing and taking potshots at decorations. Yang whipped around to look at Blake, who nodded sharply. They both vaulted the low fence around the statue and went after the rear of the group.

  
  


The Manta's weapons were finally locked on the rogue Knights below, and--gods help them--a Paladin that was emerging from a parking garage with guns live. An increasing number of the ship's sensors were returning nonsense, so Ironwood commandeered one of the manual turrets and trusted what his eyes told him. Focus. Shoot. Focus. Shoot.

Many ground-level lights were out and fires were burning in several locations, turning the plaza into a shifting hellscape of ruddy colors. While Ironwood took out Knights, the minder was doing its own work, coming back with a grim prognosis: whoever had orchestrated the cyber attack had high-level access to Atlas codes, and knew how to use them to efficiently disarm the forces in an emergency. If he and Hazel both lived through this--

The ship rocked again, this time from a direct hit. Rocket? Ironwood started to turn, then his entire right side locked up.

  
  


"Weiss!" Ruby sprinted the last few meters as her teammate turned with an undisguised look of relief.

Then her eyes went wide and she said, "Get down!"

Ruby dropped, and an energy blast raked the air where she had been standing. Weiss dived to the side and threw up a glyph near Ruby's feet, which Ruby promptly kicked off from to roll herself out of the line of fire.

"We can't fight this thing without our gear," said Weiss as she sprang back to her feet.

Ruby nodded, scowling. "But as long as it's chasing us, it's not shooting other people. Ahh!" She cut off to dodge another blast, and they split up to circle the battlesuit, making it switch targets. "Keepaway toward the van, so we can get our gear?"

"I hate your plans," gasped Weiss, as the next shot barely missed her and lit a food stall on fire. Delicious toasted meat flavors wafted through the air as they ran, and more weapons fire streaked overhead.

  
  


"Report," Ironwood ground out. Short of breath, and depending on what exactly was shutting down, this would get bad _fast._

Alarms wailed. "Incom--" The pilot's warning ended in a scream as heat engulfed the ship and licked in through a broken window. Flames but no extra rocket impact--where was that coming from? No time, as the Manta jolted hard and went into a sickening spin. One of the propellers gone, at least.

Ironwood dropped into slow time, told the minder to overclock to its limit. Mapped out the steps in his head, ignoring the singeing heat and the crawl of ash past the window as the ship spun earthward. There was a repair kit by the turret, reachable with his left hand. Utility knife, pliers, wire cutters, probes, a bright sequence of instructions with no mistakes allowed.

His breath was shallow, and the seconds were dripping by. He reached and snagged the kit, watched with distant approval as his working hand flipped it open and grasped the first tool. Slice along the back of the neck, deep enough to expose the chip and then peel the skin aside, ignoring how much it hurt.

Discard, clamp, connect... Coming up fast, that ground was. He applied current, felt his whole body seize in white fire and then unlock as the chip went offline.

Impact. The side of the ship crumpled in toward him, and everything went red and then black.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And now I know why everybody says "don't write big action scenes, they're a pain in the ass."
> 
> Coming up next: Some more shooting, some bad people, and a long-overdue meeting.


	11. Crash

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The team regroups after the Vale Plaza attack, and finally comes face-to-face with their anonymous employer.

_Ha'Penny: Are you all right?_

_RedHood: 1sec_

_RedHood: running_

_RedHood: from giant robot_

_Ha'Penny: I assure you, my question can wait until that situation is resolved._

_RedHood: scool_

_RedHood: skillz_

  
  


"We need to get off the main level--wait. Are you seriously texting right now?" If you could recharge your aura off of pure outrage, Weiss was golden. 

"Um." Ruby peeked up over the concrete barrier she was sheltering behind, then ducked down again immediately. "I refuse to answer on the grounds that you'll hit me? Anyway, break in three, two, go!"

They both left cover, pelting across a small stretch of open ground before diving behind a fountain and a staircase respectively. A few bullets came after them, but it was a notable drop from the fury they had been dodging for the last several minutes of frantic travel. 

Weiss' coat had torn somewhere in the chase, and her left side was wet from an ill-fated ice statue. "I think we lost the Paladin," she said, trying to catch her breath. "Maybe because they know the Atlas cavalry is coming. Which, sidebar, is a great reason for us to  _get underground._ " 

"Escalator, over there," Ruby pointed. She frowned up at a rooftop where a figure was surrounded by a dancing ring of fire, but then smoke rolled past to shroud the whole thing. "Hey, do you see that?"

Weiss was uninterested. "Whatever it is, weapons first." 

The immediate area was clear of civilians, so their motive to stay exposed was gone. They went, and as Ruby jogged behind Weiss, she fumbled her scroll back out. 

  
  


_Ha'Penny: I tried calling, but the network is spotty. Please stay safe._

_RedHood: im good_

_RedHood: no more robot_

_RedHood: i mean_

_RedHood: we didn't kill it_

_RedHood: next time_

_Ha'Penny: I am very glad._

_Ha'Penny: When you are able to talk, I would like to hear what is happening._

_Ha'Penny: I believe my father is in the area, and I cannot reach him._

* * *

There was smoke everywhere, and the smell of burned meat. Ironwood came to in a convulsive movement and rolled onto his side just in time to spit out bile. Low light, flickering red--emergency bulbs or flames?

_Get out, no time--the whole cavern is going to go._ He could feel the chemicals eating into his right side, corroding...

"Over here!" The voice, above and unexpected, separated past and present. The smoke smelled different too, the acrid stink of burning electronics instead of flesh. And he hurt, but he could move.

And should. Nothing friendly had happened yet tonight, and he wouldn't bet on that voice being the first. He started to extricate himself from the wreckage of the turret, and by the time the voices got closer, he could reach Due Process.

* * *

Blake wished the attack had never happened, wanted to reach the end of that conversation with Yang, but... there was a guilty pleasure in just being in a straight-up fight. She-- _they_ \--had been jogging along with Yang for a minute, cutting the chaos with that adrenaline edge. The two of them had started by rolling some Droogs for their guns, coming up behind when the gangsters weren't looking and taking out the rear pair before teaming up on the third.

Then, freshly armed, they roamed further afield. Directed some terrified pedestrians toward the less-wrecked stairs to get off the plaza, even scooped up a couple of kids to make sure they got into the crowd and hopefully back to their parents. Then, hunting time.

Now, Blake was hanging back in the shadows, circling and watching Yang step out between two pillars and spread her arms wide. "Hey, dipshits!" Yang called happily to the dark-clad group ahead of her, who were starting to box in a cowering cluster of party-goers.

The gangsters turned, and Blake's stomach dropped. Silver masks, some of their ears sticking out over their hoods... they hadn't known the Fangs were here.

Yang was unburdened by those details. The Fangs lifted their guns to take aim at her, and she laughed. "Good--now I don't have to feel bad for this." Then she was running toward them, and Blake's heart caught in their throat for a second even though they knew what was going to happen.

Triggers pulled and bullets streaked through the air, but Yang squeezed off a short burst first, over their heads but making them flinch enough to throw off their aim. By the time they recentered and fired, she had already kicked off the ground. She sailed through the air, hair streaming behind her and fist upraised, pure joy in every line of her body.

Blake unstuck. Fangs or not, chance to be recognized or not, you didn't ditch your teammate. They dashed the rest of the way, emerging on one side to catch one of the Fangs by the wrist and roll, sink the armbar tight and then  _pull_ \--he screamed and Blake kicked him in the head for good measure, then rolled up and looked for the next target. 

* * *

Qrow was moving as fast as he could while sticking to cover, because this whole thing itched like a bombing run about to happen. "Hey, ice princess, just got eyes on the bumblebee. Feel bad for the other guys. Where's security? This place should be swarming."

"I know," Weiss' reply came promptly, too distracted to even be annoyed at the code name. "There's some jamming and... I think something else going on, but I haven't had a chance to crack it. We just got to the van."

That would explain the background noise, which sounded like Ruby crooning to someone that she was never going to leave them again. 

"Great," Qrow said. "I'm a big fan of getting the fuck out of--hold on." 

His scroll was vibrating, so he pulled it out to check as he continued toward Blake and Yang. Yang appeared to be confiscating every gun she liked and dumping clips from the rest, and he made a mental note to remind her that they probably shouldn't take all of that home. Then he finally got a look at the screen.

  
  


_Tinman: Are you near Vale Plaza?_

_AngryBird: Why?_

  
  


First time he'd actually written back since the whole... thing. He felt a bit bad about that, to be honest. Felt less bad a second later when the scroll lit up with a voice connection coming through. 

He was surprised enough to answer. "Yeah. Actually, wait--" Two more steps, a jump, come down hard with a kick on the gang member (Fang, looked like) who was stirring. Yang turned and saw him, they exchanged thumbs up. Nothing like a little violence to patch up a family spat. 

"Hello?" Right, the scroll. The voice--Tinman's voice--sounded rough. 

Qrow's attention focused as the details cued in. He held up a finger to forestall Yang and Blake and cradled the scroll closer to his ear. "Can't get enough of me, huh?"

"If you can get to Vale, I need transport." Pause, then a loud gunshot, then a breath. "I can pay. Obviously."

It was surreal, standing in the middle of a terrorist attack and talking to a dude you had sort of ghosted for criminal-slash-personal reasons. Qrow rolled with it. "I like money, obviously, but why should we stick our necks out for you? Vale is a certified shitshow."

There was a long pause, and sounds Qrow parsed as distant alarms, labored breathing, and a crackling that sounded fire-ish. Yang was spreading her arms at him in a  _what gives_ gesture, and he waved his hand impatiently at her. Then started to worry a little, in spite of himself, as the pause dragged on. "Tinman. You listening?"

A rustle, then Qrow pulled the scroll away from his ear as the sharp sounds of ricochets pierced through. Two more loud reports from what must be Tinman's gun, then an uneven dragging sound that was probably him on the move. 

But finally, he answered. "Hello?" Sounded a bit lost.

_Fuck._ "Tinman. You called me. How messed up are you?"

A louder huff, might have been a laugh. "I'm here. Under the main stage, looks like. Stick your neck out because we were starting to be friends, I think." A pause. "But if you're going to, make it soon. I need to dump this scroll."

"Tin--" But he was already cut off. He looked at the scroll for a moment, baffled, then up at Blake and Yang who were clearly about out of patience. He sighed, toggled on the comm, and said, "Who's up to make some extra cash on the way home?"

* * *

Tyrian had been prowling. Staying out of sight, because Cinder was a bitch, but she wasn't wrong about Watts. Tyrian knew that. Had known Watts for almost twenty  _years_ , and if Cinder thought she knew the full measure of pain that man could dish out, she was naive. It wasn't Tyrian's job to correct that, no matter how nicely he'd asked. 

So he kept out of sight, but there were always people who strayed too close to the edge of any crowd, feeling safe in the herd and never imagining how  _fast_ you could vanish if everyone had their eyes off you at the wrong time. Tyrian left several still, silent reminders behind him. 

Until he saw them, standing out in the open, and he froze up in sheer delight. Two young women he didn't know, one with black hair and one with yellow, not much interest except they looked like a better fight than average. But next to them, a gray-frosted dark head and a thin frame he knew well, jacket slung over his shoulders like a cape, scroll to his ear like he was having a casual conversation when Tyrian knew damn well that all the legitimate networks were down. 

"Hello, little lost bird," he whispered reverently. Started forward on silent feet, already looking at the angles, where they were likely to move from here...

And then, like the monumental cockblock she was, Cinder's voice in his ear. "Security is on their way. Time for us to move out."

"In a minute," he murmured. "Found something tasty." Qrow was looking down at his scroll and shaking his head, turning to say something to the other two. 

"Tyrian. Now. Or Watts will switch you off."

Tyrian snarled soundlessly.  _Yearned_ forward for a moment, then pressed the images of all three people into his mind. He would find them. "I'm leaving." 

He blew a kiss to the trio, who never once looked toward his clump of shadows. Then he faded back further into the structure to find his way out. 

* * *

Step one, they all made it to the van. Ruby was in the driver's seat, which was all the evidence anyone needed about how busy Weiss must be. 

Qrow, Blake, and Yang got their weapons with naked relief (step two) while Weiss caught them up. "Vale Plaza is so built up, there's lots of space and service roadways in the underlayers. But between the damage and everyone trying to get out, it's a mess. I think this is about as far as we can drive." 

Qrow nodded. "Assuming we can find him, do we have an exit?" 

"Pretty sure. Also, a minute ago the public network came back up. So there's a lot more people about to be watching, and Mantle and Atlas security are going to be crawling all over." Unspoken was the question of why they weren't already--it was clear that something big had gone down, and just as clear that they weren't likely to know the details until they'd gotten out of the blast radius.

"Under the main stage is kind of on fire," Yang pointed out. "If he's in there, how do we spot him?"

"I sent Special and Snowflake ahead to scout. I've seen a few bodies, but I don't know what he actually looks like, so..." Weiss shrugged, unhappy. "I might have a trail, though." 

She gestured, and a view popped up on the larger screen in the back of the van. The drone's camera was focused on two Knights on the ground, each one drilled by what looked like a large-caliber shot.

"Your boyfriend's got good aim," Yang observed. 

Qrow rolled his eyes. "It's not like that."

"Cool," said Yang. "So you don't mind if I read your message history?"

"Fuck you," said Qrow.

Weiss coughed to interrupt. "Another body in the doorway up ahead." She cut the drone's light as it drifted closer. The room beyond was some kind of service bay, a minor maze of scaffolding, furniture, and support beams that weren't all standing as straight as they were supposed to. 

"Fangs," Blake supplied softly as the camera neared and then passed over the body, which was still wearing one of the silver masks. "But where did they get all the explosives?"

Nobody answered, and Weiss caught up with the other camera to search the cluttered cavern faster. A minute crawled by, then another, while the feeling of being exposed sunk deeper between Qrow's shoulder blades. "There," she said finally. "That might be him?"

Qrow looked up from checking the maps. On screen, a dim picture was emerging as the drone got closer. The man was dark-haired and bearded, wearing a long coat that had probably been white at some point in the evening. Blistered skin showed through in a couple of patches, and the right sleeve was half shredded, exposing long slashes of gleaming metal. He was holding a pair of heavy pistols, alert but leaning heavily against the wall. 

"He's taller than I thought," Qrow said. "But... looks about right? Best lead so far, and we're short on time." 

Special inched closer and the man's head snapped up. The drone started to scoot back, but the white pistol was already lifting, hand tightening. A moment later, there was a flash before the picture winked out.

"Oops," said Ruby.

"Wait." Weiss' voice was tight, her eyes wide when Qrow looked over at her. "We need to leave. Now. I know him. That's James Ironwood--he runs the whole Atlas security network."

"What?" It was the most banal thing to say, but Qrow heard it come out of his mouth anyway. 

Ruby whistled. Yang was less restrained: " _Shit,_ " she said reverently. "Way to pick 'em, Uncle Qrow."

Weiss wasn't laughing. "What are we going to do?" She looked about as scared as he'd ever seen her. 

Qrow sucked in a breath, rubbing his hands over his face. He felt cold with the shock, a bit of whiplash from the prospect of meeting the guy to... this. He knew the answer--he didn't want it, but that wasn't a reason not to say it. "You all split. And I take care of it."

Ruby's voice was smaller than usual. "What does that mean? Because it sounds a little... murder-y."

Qrow closed his eyes, one more deep breath. He reached for the clarity he used to have, and found it waiting close at hand. Eyes open again, he looked at Ruby. "Can you think of a good reason for an Atlas security bigwig to be employing a team of neighborhood criminals? Because I can think of  _lots_ of reasons, and they all end facedown in the river." She winced, but he continued, merciless. "So you kids are going to clear the fuck out, and I'm going to go see if he has an amazing explanation. He won't." 

He glanced around at all of them--Blake looked a little thrown, but she nodded just a fraction of an inch. Weiss' eyes were still wide, but her mouth was hard. Yang's face was unreadable. And Ruby just looked miserable. He knew he was right, but somehow it didn't feel that way as he finished. "Whatever's going on up there, in another few hours he'll be back behind fifty layers of security. You take the shot when it comes."

Yang kept looking at him as he turned away. "It's been a while since I heard your work voice. I'd almost forgotten what it sounded like." 

He didn't flinch, not quite. The path ahead was clear. "Meet at Beacon," he said as he checked Harbinger's load one last time. "I'll call you when it's safe to go home."

* * *

How long had it been since he'd called Qrow? (How long had it been since he couldn't tell what time it was? It was quieter in his head than it had been in years.) Ironwood had a decent position for cover, but he'd had to move once the drone spotted him. The odds of anyone coming to get him out of this were... not good. 

He went through the options one more time, between moving and listening. 

One, head topside and look for rescue. Hope that he didn't get sniped by whoever he had seen on that rooftop calling flames out of empty air. Hope that he didn't get rolled up by Atlas robotics or improbably well-armed gang members. 

That was a lot of hope to stack in one place, especially given that someone out there had  _hacked his chip._ Which meant he wasn't supposed to walk away from that crash. 

Option two, look for a separate exit and find a way to reach Pietro on his own. He'd have to stay out of sight or he'd be reported promptly, and if he was picked up by police... At that point, he might as well head upstairs now and save himself the effort. 

He was... not in great shape for option two. His aura had broken in the crash, and though it had prevented anything else from breaking, he'd taken some damage. There were burns on his arm and back that hurt like hell but were probably (hopefully) superficial. A head wound that was gumming up one set of eyelashes with blood, but there he was more worried about the splitting headache and wandering concentration. He didn't think he had a major concussion, but could admit he wasn't the most reliable judge at the moment. 

His heartbeat was strong, which meant the cyber attack hadn't penetrated  _that_ far. But between the aura depletion and the chip being out of commission, his right side felt sluggish, heavy. His top speed was a modest jog, and not for long. 

Option three was to sit down and rest for a while. It really appealed. 

Option two it was, though. Run through the list of suspects one more time, to order his thoughts, then admit that Qrow wasn't coming and move out. 

He had just started from the top when a shape hurtled down from above, on his bad side, and slammed into him like a load of bricks. Admittedly not the world's  _heaviest_ load of bricks, but the kick was well-placed and his balance was off, and it sent him sprawling. He started to rise, bringing up Due Process for a shot he probably wouldn't have time to finish, when a hard blow from something flat numbed his hand and sent the pistol skidding. Then a foot came down hard on his jaw, grinding his head to the side as something heavy gauge pressed into his throat. 

"Hi,  _Jimmy,_ " said a voice, low and cold. "You've got a minute. Make it good."

"Qrow. What are you--" He cut off as the gun barrel dug in harder. 

"Tell me what game Atlas is playing that needs Hunters as the pieces. Fifty seconds." 

The tumble had brought a fresh wave of dizziness that was starting to recede, but he couldn't  _think_ fast enough. "Not... not Atlas. Just me." 

There he stopped, because there was movement in the half-light, getting closer. Before he could figure out if it was just his eyes playing tricks, a voice called out, "Wait, Uncle Qrow!"

The foot on his jaw didn't let up. If he slewed his eyes all the way to that side, he could just barely see the straight line of the shotgun barrel, up to the sword, up to Qrow's arm, up to his face that hadn't so much as twitched at the interruption. "I told you to leave," he grated, not turning his head.

The new additions came closer--four of them, the whole team if he was right. It was the youngest one, in front, who had spoken. Ruby. "You did say that," she said, eyes on Qrow. "Then you left, and I'm the team leader, so I overruled you."

Qrow actually growled in frustration. "It wasn't up for debate." Now the pressure on Ironwood's jaw eased up a fraction, just enough for him to slowly turn his head to look Qrow in the face. But the shotgun didn't waver. "Twenty seconds," the red-eyed Hunter said.

Ironwood locked eyes with him, saw a total and certain willingness to pull the trigger. In his peripheral vision, the women had drawn closer, weapons in hand but not leveled at anyone. 

He'd spent a year not even  _hinting_ it aloud, a year before that barely daring to think it to himself. But if he died now, Penny was on her own, so the words had to come out. He looked up at Qrow, at his mercy. His voice was steady. "I need you to break into Atlas to steal an AI core."

Qrow blinked, better than the blank executioner's mask that had been his expression up to that point. But then his brows drew down and he said, "Bullshit. You've got all the access in the world, Jimmy. Get it yourself."

"I can't. I'll be the first suspect. It has to be outsiders."

While the seconds trickled past--and he was pretty sure he was over his time now--the team had arrived. Now the one with blue-white hair leaned in, looking at him with an edge of animosity. "Why would you want to do that? They're psychotic."

Ironwood's eyes flicked over to her. "Not all of them."

"Penny." Ruby again. He jerked at the sound of the name, couldn't help himself, and Qrow snarled and slammed his head back against the concrete. 

Ruby's eyes were big, and she shook her head. "I don't really understand, but somehow... you're Penny's father, aren't you?"

The skeptical one (diamond avatar, hard and brilliant) looked over at her. "Your weirdo friend from Amity, Penny?"

"Hey." Ruby glared at her.

"I didn't say she was  _bad,_ but... definitely weird."

"Am I killing this guy or not?" An almost complaining note had crept into Qrow's tone.

"No," said Ruby, at the same time her friend said, "Maybe."

"Fuck," Qrow sighed. He raked a hand over his hair. " _Fuck._ All right. Grab his guns; we need to move."

It wasn't until Ironwood was disarmed and on his feet that he had a chance to ask about Penny. But by the time he strung the words together, he couldn't quite get his mouth to pronounce them, could barely manage to keep swinging one foot in front of the other. He took it a step at a time, and promised himself that he would live long enough to figure out the rest.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Coming up next: A pitch for an improbable rescue, and a couple of awkward conversations.


	12. Pietro's

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Now that I have a better feel for where the story sits, I've shifted it to No Archive Warnings Apply. There are a few places where there's more description of blood or injury, including the third and fourth scenes of this chapter. I'd still rate it below "graphic," but everyone's different with that, so I wanted to mention it.

"This dude is heavy. What do they feed them in Atlas?"

One foot in front of the other. Tunnel vision, or maybe the light down here really was that bad.

"What about his chip? Those can be tracked."

That was important. "Shorted out," Ironwood roused himself enough to mumble. 

"I'll drive. Weiss, this would be a good night to not show up on any traffic cameras--" "Obviously."

Thank the gods for the seat belts, or he'd be falling over. He tried to stay tuned in, but the flow of voices slipped past like a busy stream. 

"The news has been stepped on pretty hard. There's barely any details."

"Looks like they got a picture of every body on the ground, though."

"What does it say about--" "--here, look for yourself--"

"Just 'gangs?' They have to know more than that. Security was there, they could see--"

"Yeah, Droogs and Fangs. Didn't know they were friends." "They're not."

"Check Amity and the socials, someone's got to be talking about it--" 

"Oh shit, there's a curfew starting in twenty minutes."

"Hey, how much longer do you think it'll take to get to Pietro's if I drive off a fucking overpass?" That was Qrow, his tone conversational. "Quiet down back there."

"Drama queen," muttered Yang.

Ruby's voice came closer than the others, probably leaning in. "He doesn't look so good." Ironwood thought about speaking up to set the record straight, but decided against it. His eyelids were heavy. 

"Eh. Head wounds bleed a lot. So, what, you know his kid?"

"I think so. I'll explain when we get there. It's, uh, complicated?"

It should have been impossible to relax, surrounded by strangers, injured and hurtling into the unknown. But somehow, as the team started bickering about shortcuts and Qrow's "For fuck's sake--" drifted back from the driver's seat, Ironwood found the sounds receding into a pleasant blur and then a doze. 

* * *

Weiss was so focused on making sure their drive was trouble- and trace-free, she didn't even have a chance to judge the neighborhood. That ended when they slowed down for the final turns, and she eyed the dilapidated buildings and the halfhearted graffiti. " _ This _ is where we sent all those parts?"

"Pietro's cool," offered Yang from the back.

"He has a dog!" added Ruby, her tone suggesting that this settled the issue. 

Despite everything that had happened, it was only late evening. When Pietro let them in to the workshop area, Weiss sized up the space in a glance, and otherwise kept her eyes on their passenger. Ironwood looked like he had been dragged through a grinder the wrong way, but he stood up tall and moved with purpose, if a little stiffly. 

"Pietro," he said when he laid eyes on the other man, his face splitting in a smile that honestly looked a bit ghastly right now. But after an initial blink the older engineer seemed just as happy to see him. Wasn't that nice. 

Ruby was shifting around in the background in her I-have-an-unsubtle-secret way, and Weiss was getting ready to snap at her when Penny's voice broke in. "Hello, father. I am very relieved to see you." 

Everyone but Pietro swiveled to look, which took a second because there wasn't actually a  _ person _ to look at. Well, not a person shape, at least. The long workbench was covered in half-assembled parts and circuitry. One of the only finished pieces, a hand, wiggled in a wave. Next to it was a screen with a smiling face that Weiss recognized from the rally in Amity.  _ Huh. _

Ironwood's poise deserted him for a second, and he actually swayed on his feet. He recovered fast, though. "Penny?" He took a step toward her, then another. "Are you really here?"

"Approximately, yes. But you look like you need to sit down."

A few minutes later, everyone had tea (with Pietro slightly stretching the definition of "mug" to make do). Ruby was sitting on the floor halfway under the workbench, resuming the friendship of the century with Zwei. The rest of them were perched on whatever chairs or surfaces would hold them, except Ironwood, who kept looking toward Penny's screen and still hadn't sat down. He'd at least used a rag to wipe the worst of the blood from his face, so he looked mildly sinister instead of alarming. 

Weiss didn't trust it, or the way that everyone seemed to be bending into the idea of planning some kind of suicide heist. Qrow was her best hope for a holdout, and he definitely had his what-fresh-hell-is-this face on for most of the conversation so far. "Okay," he said to Penny while everyone else was negotiating their drinks, "you were alive, but you got sick, then your consciousness was moved onto a computer. And it's all hush-hush, because Atlas. I can just about handle that. But if you're  _ here, _ you don't need someone to get you out of the arcology, right? You're already out."

"Not exactly. I exploited a security flaw to send out a compressed package, with instructions to make a personality scaffold on underused server space. But I am also in Atlas. The me you are speaking to--current pronouns really are inadequate to the situation--is incomplete. For the transfer, I prioritized my personality matrix, but had to leave most of my memory banks." She paused, taking in several confused looks, and sighed. "For example, I know that I love and trust both James and Pietro. But the memories that root those feelings are unavailable to me."

The look on Ironwood's face would have made Weiss feel bad, if she was a softer target. It passed after a moment into careful neutrality. "You don't remember me," he said.

"In large part, no. But, as I said, I know how I feel." Penny looked like she wanted to say more, but after a second, looked to Qrow instead. "Does that help to answer your question?"

Qrow slouched back further in his chair. "I'm sorry I asked, so close enough."

Pietro leaned forward slightly, clearing his throat. "How long do we have here, right now, to decide and to plan?"

Ironwood started to take a drink of his tea, but his right hand had a tremor. He set the cup down, frowning and starting to pace instead. "I have probably twenty-four to thirty-six hours before I need to resurface. It's risky to be gone that long, but someone made a very credible attempt to kill me, and I need to know who. There are contingencies set up in the system to track key players in the event of my removal. Giving those a day or so to play out may tell me who at Atlas was behind this."

"Does that sound paranoid to everyone, or just me?" Weiss wondered aloud.

Ironwood shot her a flat look. "The circumstances seem to vindicate the basic idea. Onsite Atlas cameras were bypassed, combat robots were hacked, even my chip was compromised." He tapped the back of his neck and then looked at his fingers, irritated, when they came away red. 

Qrow pinched the bridge of his nose. "Would you sit down and stop bleeding everywhere? You're making me nervous."

"Perhaps," interjected Pietro, "you can lay out the steps that would need to happen for this to work, James. Then they can think it over, while I see what I can pull from that chip of yours."

Ironwood nodded and folded his hands behind his back. "All right. Penny, please step in with anything I've overlooked. Here's what I had worked out..."

* * *

The girls had quieted down, a mix of sleeping and ducking into Amity when they should probably be sleeping instead. But Qrow only had so much authority figure in him, and didn't feel like pushing his luck. 

Sleep seemed unlikely for him, with the unease of the attack and the possible consequences circling around in his head. It had been a while since Mantle had really bad unrest--last time was the Menagerie riots, and the Autumn-61 crash ten years before that. Curfews, crackdowns, watching the kids grow up faster than they should have to. 

There wasn't anything useful around to hit, and Qrow had done all the loitering downstairs he could stand. Now he found himself upstairs in Pietro's apartment, following the sound of voices to Pietro and Ironwood in the kitchen. They both had their backs to him, and Ironwood had peeled layers down to his undershirt, which was... a thing. It looked like his right arm replacement went up to the shoulder and even a bit further, real and synthetic muscle fibers blending where they joined up with metal augments on his spine. It was complex and fascinating and Qrow was frankly kind of an asshole for noticing this hard, given the bloodstains that made an irregular collar on the shirt. 

The mess seemed to be centered on a wound at the back of his neck, which Pietro was blotting with a rag so he could hook up some kind of electronic probe. Qrow decided now was not the time to stop being a creepy asshole, and stayed in the hallway shadows to listen. 

"Sorry," Pietro was saying, met with a grunt and a shrug from Ironwood. Nice shoulders, really, including the meat one. 

"Do you think you'll be able to clone it?" Though his tone was calm, Ironwood's fingers were lightly flexing and relaxing, scratching against the tabletop.

"Hm," Pietro said. "I'll pull what I can. But it's a bit of a mess."

Ironwood snorted quietly. "The next time I'm doing improv surgery behind my head while my ship is crashing, I'll try to use better technique."

"As long as you know what you did," Pietro said, every bit the affable professor. Then he sobered. "Do you know who was behind it?"

"If I was guessing, I'd put Arthur first in line for my funeral. But there's clearly something larger going on, and I won't know until I get back. It's... strange, not being able to pull all the information I want." He lifted a hand to touch his temple, where his hair was going silver. "Very quiet, aside from the headache."

After a moment, he spoke again, voice lower. "I wish I could reach Penny to tell her I'm alive. I feel like a bastard, hiding down here so that I can flush them out."

"You're no good to her if you're dead. And when it comes down to it, I suspect she's stronger than any of us." Pietro's hands stilled for a moment, then he reached out to squeeze Ironwood's shoulder. "Now, tell me what she's been up to." 

As Ironwood started to talk about art projects, Qrow felt suddenly more like an intruder. He faded back to go prowl somewhere else. 

* * *

The explosion ripped through the cavern, obliterating two lives, six already-cold corpses, and part of Ironwood's right side. The fire Dust was bad enough, but mixed with the extraction chemicals, it clung and started eating in to armor and flesh. 

In the dream, the Grimm in the tunnels above weren't slain, only waiting. In the dream, they came back, pacing a slow circle around him as he dragged himself toward his gun that was... still gripped by shreds of his hand, in a moment of sickening realization. 

He ran out of strength halfway there, bloody fingertips dragging uselessly against the stone, muscles gone to jelly as his Semblance lay an ocean of aura away. 

He felt cold breath against his ear, then the first nibble at his shoulder. Grunted and pushed off with his good arm, teeth raking meat as he flipped himself over so he could at least face his end. Another set of jaws seized at his lower leg, digging in and tearing at the tendons as a scream ripped out of his throat. Then the rest of the pack closed in, feeding. 

In the midst of it, a coldness spread over his right side, blissful relief from the searing bite of the chemical mix. He was glad, until in his thrashing he caught sight of it. He realized then that the whole side of his body had transmuted to steel, prosthetic parts lying pristine but immobile. And the Grimm nuzzled against his left side and tore him away piece by piece, mouthful by mouthful, until only the metalwork was left. 

Finally, one of them seized on his metal shoulder and worried at it. He tried to throw it off but he couldn't even twitch. It continued, insistent, shaking him harder. He was beating at the walls of his mind, desperate to move his body somehow, until finally his arm flailed out and he felt a satisfying impact in his fist.

He was... awake? He couldn't tell, couldn't catch his breath. His heartbeat sounded irregular in his ears; had the augment pump died? He lingered in an agony of sleep paralysis, his vision a smear of gray and black. 

A moment later there was light, a warm glow a short distance off and to the side. A shadowy figure came closer, coalescing into a person, one arm lifted to rub their jaw. 

He still couldn't move. In a half-awake stupor, the grip of the dream lingered, and he knew that if he looked down he would find most of his body gnawed away. 

There was a sigh, and the figure dragged something closer to sit on. Then reached out, and he couldn't even pull away--he felt his heart rate spike, useless. Then he felt two points of pressure, one on each hand. 

_ Each _ hand. He had two. Still connected to him. 

After a minute he could identify the sensation as thumbs, rubbing a circle in each of his palms. After another minute, he could identify which hand was metal and which was flesh. 

Around then, he realized he could probably move, and twitched his fingers experimentally. 

"You back?" said a gravelly voice. Qrow. Who had... just woken him up from a humiliating nightmare. 

"Fuck," he said, rough but audible. He tried to sit up, and found that he could, slowly. 

There was a tired chuckle, and Qrow sat back, dropping his hands and looking at him assessingly. "Well, now I know how you spotted Yang's arm so fast. Hope the, uh, hand thing was okay. She used to have sync problems sometimes, when she woke up in a bad patch." He had started out matter-of-fact, for which Ironwood was profoundly grateful. But he seemed a bit embarrassed by the end, rubbing the back of his neck. 

Ironwood swung his legs down so he could rest his feet on the floor, staring down at his hands and flexing them. As he sorted through the jumble of impressions, the moment of waking returned to him. He blinked and looked over at Qrow. "Did I hit you? Sorry."

Qrow smirked and shrugged one shoulder. "I think that's the first time this week someone's landed a hit on me that I didn't deserve. Nice to have one to feel righteous about."

Ironwood was starting to feel increasingly uneasy about their physical proximity, with Qrow still sitting next to the makeshift bed. To cover it, he said, "Thanks for waking me." How much noise had he been making? Best not to think about it. 

"Sure. Tell me to fuck off 'cause it's none of my business, but... Yang's is just the elbow down. Yours is the whole arm, right?" His tone was still matter-of-fact, and Ironwood found that he didn't mind answering. 

It was always easier to think of it like an engineering problem, rather than his body. "Arm including the shoulder, some connecting muscles. Also the leg and hip on that side, and a couple of organ issues that had to be fixed for the whole thing to hold together." And he was  _ not _ going to get into all the details there. "Roughly, half my body." 

Qrow whistled. "I didn't know that was possible." 

Ironwood made a noise, not quite a laugh. "It may not be. Software has to do some heavy lifting to make everything play well in combat. There are other problems." He shrugged, reminding himself that none of these people were friends. Only hours ago, they'd been thinking about killing him--still might be, a couple of them.

As if aware of his thoughts, Qrow leaned back, his expression going cooler and more reserved. "The team's going to make a decision later about whether to do this whole crazy thing. Pretty sure they're going to go for it, even without Ruby breaking out the weapons-grade guilt trips."

Ironwood sat up straighter, resting his hands on his legs in a more formal posture. "And you have something to say about that."

Qrow looked at him steadily for a few seconds. "For something like this, you'll pay whatever it takes."

Ironwood's jaw tightened, but he nodded. "I will."

Qrow's fingers drummed on his knee, rings flashing, before he clenched the hand and went still. "On top of whatever gets negotiated, I want everything you can dig up on the Salem Project." 

Ironwood tried to place the name, couldn't. "I don't know it, but I'll look."

The other man's eyes flicked over his face, searching, but he didn't seem to find whatever he was looking for. "It was a corporate black-ops program back during the Hundred Companies period, right before the Autumn-61 crash. I thought... I had thought it was dead after that. But that job a week ago, the stuff in the basement had their marks all over it." He didn't move, but he had gone so tense he was practically vibrating, rolled-up sleeves showing muscles taut in his forearms. 

Ironwood wished he wasn't exhausted, because this conversation suddenly felt like a minefield. He nodded again, slowly. "I'll start with the dump from those servers, then dig back." Though he normally wouldn't bother adding it, it seemed important now: "I'll be careful."

Qrow stood abruptly, hands sliding into his pockets, characteristic slouch coming back on like a costume. "Do that. And this part of the deal is you and me--leave the team out of it."

Ironwood raised his brows. Before he could say anything, Qrow added, "You have to be ex-military, I can practically smell the boot polish on you. They love that chain of command, need to know bullshit."

He might be offended about that, if it weren't so accurate. "That logic doesn't work so well with family."

Qrow half turned away, and his voice hardened. "Let me worry about that. But that's the price, if we're in on this."

In the end, there was no real decision to make. He told himself that Qrow's problems were not his to solve, and he said, "All right."

* * *

It was midmorning before Ironwood ventured downstairs. Pietro was still asleep after staying up far too late to perform electronic necromancy on the burned chip. Ironwood had done as much contingency planning as he could do without the minder, and trying to watch the news was like trying to eat the memory of the smell of a hamburger. 

Around the time he realized that all his metaphors were going food-centered, he smelled coffee wafting up the stairs, and made his way down to investigate. He heard an argument coming from the workshop area, which stayed unintelligible even as he got close enough to make out the words. 

"Spicy peanut sauce with a crunch pebble garnish, I'm telling you." Ruby, he was fairly sure. 

Someone made a gagging noise. Someone else talked over that: "You ever want to shape up those noodle arms, you gotta get some protein in there."

"Options appear to include bacon, egg whites, chicken, and tofu." That was definitely Penny. Around then, he realized that he had stopped and was just eavesdropping in the doorway now. Which he would stop doing, just... as soon as he could figure out if he was listening to an actual conversation or having some sort of aneurysm. 

"Qrow," he heard someone else say. A less familiar voice, so probably Blake--she had been the quietest. "Qrow, wake up. They're ordering breakfast and it's escalating."

An indistinct grumble was the only answer. "Yang," and Blake sounded worried now, "pass me that coffee." 

"Yeah, sure." Yang again. "Okay, let's do egg whites and bacon. Tofu looks risky based on these reviews. Penny, what do you think?"

Drawn by some magnetic force, Ironwood edged forward to look into the room. The team was sprawled out over Pietro's spare bedding in the kinds of postures that only youthful spines could manage. Qrow appeared to have kept himself above the chaos--literally--by improvising a nest with a blanket on top of a storage crate. But as Blake waved a cup of coffee under his nose determinedly, smelling-salts style, the older Hunter was sitting up with a growing look of alarm. 

"Hold on," he said. "What's happening?"

"Ruby is abusing the twenty-four hour menu at the nearest noodle delivery place," Weiss said. "And Penny is helping her by suggesting unnatural combinations."

"Uh." Qrow tried to take a drink of coffee, swore as he spilled some on his fingers, and then squinted at the room. "Why is the person who can't eat making food decisions? No offense, Penny."

"Oh, none taken. To be honest, I am not clear why I am being given a vote in this process."

"Because Ruby is an agent of chaos and you are her unwitting pawn," Weiss said darkly, turning back to her tablet and apparently writing off breakfast as a lost cause. 

"Agent of  _ awesome, _ I think you mean," Ruby retorted. 

Qrow looked like he wanted to die, or maybe just sleep for another twelve hours. Squinching his eyes shut, he cradled the coffee under his chin like it could protect him from evil. "Order one large whatever with chicken, one straight vegetarian, one of... whatever the fuck Ruby has cooked up. Actually, make that two each of the vegetarian and chicken, in case those poor bastards upstairs want to get some food out of this mess. And, I dunno, something fried on the side. Dumplings? Eggs? I don't know what time it is."

Blake patted him on the shoulder and Yang snickered. "Yeah, but what are you going to eat?"

"Do they have a large whiskey?"

"They do not," said Penny helpfully, "but I will add a bubble tea for you."

Qrow groaned and pulled the blanket back over his head. Ironwood, not yet observed, had to lean against the wall for a minute. It was somehow completely surreal to hear the friendly bickering, and Penny taking part in it. 

Anything. He would do  _ anything _ it took to make this a possible future. 

Having a quiet crisis in the hallway, he patted down his hair and straightened the clothes he had borrowed from Pietro. He could bring order out of chaos from terabytes of data and conniving Atlas VPs. Surely he could handle one team of young professional lunatics. 

* * *

Later in the day, Weiss blocked Ironwood as he was coming out of Pietro's bathroom. He sized her up for a second and then raised his brows. "Something you needed?"

"What I need is for you to leave my friends out of this. This plan... there's too many things that can go wrong." Weiss felt like even more of a bitch saying it out loud than she had thinking it, and told herself that it didn't matter how cool Penny was. You couldn't save everyone.

He studied her for a minute and she tried not to feel self-conscious.  _ You're not in charge here, asshole. _ Finally, he said, "I can't fault you for not trusting me. But this seems to be personal."

Weiss shook her head. "It's not. They just don't know what Atlas is like, and what kind of person it takes to sit at the top of the food chain there." He looked like he wanted to say something, but now that she'd started, the words wouldn't stop. "They don't get all the little things Infosec does to keep that perfect society running. Are they still keeping profiles of everyone's family appropriateness and tracking any deviant behavior? Still encouraging school kids to snitch on each other and saving logs of therapy sessions?"

Ironwood's face was remote, and after a long second he exhaled slowly. "Yes. I argued against that program. Eventually, they started asking too many conflict of interest questions and were about to transfer the whole thing to Psyops. At that point, I shut up and worked out exactly how much data I could lose without triggering an audit."

Weiss' whole body felt tight, stomach clenched and hands curled into fists. She stared up at him. "Does that make you feel better? Do you think you're helping?"

He started to answer, stopped, and finally shook his head. "When I started, I thought I could make things better. Now I just try to limit the damage. Most days, I wouldn't say I succeed." 

Weiss swallowed. "But you're willing to bring all of us down with you."

Something flickered in his eyes, gone too fast to read. "For Penny, I'll ask. What happens next is up to your team. And if the answer is no... that's it. No retaliation, no trying to maneuver you into it. I'll find another way."

She wasn't sure she believed him, but she was tired. She looked at him a moment longer, then turned to go.

His voice was quiet, but it stopped her. "I think I know you."

She turned back, alarm bells ringing in her head. "You really don't," she said flatly.

"...You're right." He looked away, almost looking uncertain for a moment, then fixed his eyes back on her. "But you do remind me of someone I work with. Winter."

Weiss kept her voice steady. "I doubt I have anything in common with her."

"Maybe. She's incredibly talented. Quick, sharp, methodical. Maybe... not the best with people. Probably because she's spent half her life taking orders from men who aren't as smart as she is. Somehow, she still has a sense of humor." There was real affection in his voice, and it hurt to hear for reasons Weiss didn't want to think about.

Ironwood paused, then finished, still meeting her eyes squarely. "I would say she's a bit lonely, though. She lost contact with a sibling several years ago, and she misses them."

Weiss couldn't say anything for a minute. How  _ dare _ he. But saying anything would confirm it. After too long a frozen moment, she unclamped her jaw. "That sounds sad for her. It doesn't have anything to do with me, though." She thought she saw a flash of disappointment in his eyes, but she ignored it as she turned away again. This time, he didn't try to stop her. 

* * *

In the end, they said yes, and even Weiss didn't vote against it. They left Ironwood with Pietro, to wait for dark before making his way to a plausible location to be found. And Penny started updating her own plans, which she did not entirely share with anyone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, comments appreciated!


End file.
